“I’m in awe of the human ingenuity that could conceive of such a thing and then make it happen,” said K. Megan McArthur, an astronaut who flew on the repair mission last spring

Image These two images of the Carina Nebula show how observations taken in visible, top, and in infrared light can reveal complementary aspects of an object. Credit... NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said, “We’re giddy with the quality of the data we’re getting.”

Among the images were gas flying from a dying star that looked like a butterfly spreading its wings, and a galaxy nearly 10 billion light-years away whose image had been stretched and magnified by the gravity of a cluster of galaxies into a “dragon” shape. Examining such images, astronomers can study details of galaxies that existed before the Milky Way was born and chart the distribution of mysterious dark matter in the universe.

Dr. Weiler noted that the telescope was now in the best shape of its 19-year life in orbit, far surpassing the ambitions of its founders, and that it could last for at least another five years.

“Hubble gets better and better and better,” he said.

The telescope has had almost as many reincarnations as a cat. It was born in a vision of Lyman Spitzer, a Princeton astronomer who realized in 1946 that a telescope in space above the blurring effects of the atmosphere could make more precise measurements of stars, as well as see infrared and ultraviolet radiation that cannot make it through air.