Hubble's hidden treasures: Stunning pictures from the space telescope which only saw the light of day thanks to amateurs


These incredible images of deep space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope would have never been seen if it wasn't for the hard work of dedicated amateurs.

With over a million observations since the Hubble's launch 22 years ago, many of its most striking images have lain hidden in the Space Telescopes data vaults.

That was until the European Space Agency opened them up to the public, and invited skywatchers to delve into the archives and search for the hidden treasures the scientists missed - and offered prizes for the most striking images.

First prize: Josh Lake from the U.S. won the competition with this stunning image of NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud The ESA said: 'Hubble has made over a million observations since launch, but only a small proportion are attractive images — and an even smaller number are ever actually seen by anyone outside the small groups of scientists that publish them. 'But the vast amount of data in the archive means that there are still many hundreds of beautiful images scattered among the valuable, but visually unattractive, scientific data that have never been enjoyed by the public. RELATED ARTICLES Previous

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Next The Mars landing as you've never seen it before: Spectacular... The amazing image that shows every hurricane and tropical... These will make you starry-eyed! Photographers look to the... Share this article Share 'We call these pictures Hubble’s hidden treasures, and a few months ago, we invited the public to look through Hubble’s science archive to help us find them. 'The response was impressive, with almost 3000 submissions. More than a thousand of these images were fully processed: a difficult and time-consuming task.' Now the ESA has awarded prizes to the top ten entries in two categories: those that were processed and those that were simply picked out from the hundreds of thousands of images available.

Second prize: Andre van der Hoeven of the Netherlands came a close second in the jury vote with his image of the spiral galaxy Messier 77

Third prize: This image of newborn star XZ Tauri submitted by Judy Schmidt of the U.S. was was the jury¿s favourite The first prize in the processed category, which asked entrants to painstakingly optimise images to highlight the visual beauty hidden in the scientific data, went to Josh Lake from the U.S. He submitted a stunning image of NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which he optimised to create a bold two-colour image which contrasts the light from glowing hydrogen and nitrogen. 'The image is not in natural colours — hydrogen and nitrogen produce almost indistinguishable shades of red light that our eyes would struggle to tell apart,' the ESA said. 'But Josh’s processing separates them out into blue and red, dramatically highlighting the structure of the region.' For his efforts he was sent a whole range of prizes, including an iPad.

Fourth prize: Renaud Houdinet of France submitted this hugely ambitious mosaic of Hubble images showing Chamaeleon I, a large nebula near the south celestial pole

Fifth prize: Robert Gendler of the U.S. is already a well known figure in the amateur image processing world. He submitted this image of spiral galaxy Messier 96

Andre van der Hoeven, of the Netherlands, came a close second in the jury vote with an 'highly attractive' image of the spiral galaxy Messier 77, which the ESA said was 'an impressive piece of image processing, combining a number of datasets from separate instruments into one amazing picture.'

Mr der Hoeven said: 'Well, this was my hardest job until now. Combining the different datasets to get equal colors was really hard.



'M77 was not fully covered by one dataset, so I had to combine channels of the WFPC2 with different wavelengths and tune the colors to get them to fit.



'But the result is in my opinion quite astonishing. Unbelievable this one was not released before.



Third prize in the hotly contested category went to Judy Schmidt, also of the U.S., for her picture of XZ Tauri, a newborn star spraying out gas into its surroundings and lighting up a nearby cloud of dust.

This was jury's favourite, the ESA said, adding that it 'was a challenging dataset to process, as Hubble only captured two colours in this area.