NASA Is Celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30th Birthday With a Birthday Present for You

Written by

Mia Nakaji Monnier
Mia Nakaji Monnier
Mia Nakaji Monnier is a freelance writer and former weekend editor at Apartment Therapy. She lives in Los Angeles and spends most of her free time knitting.
published Apr 24, 2020
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The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 30th birthday on April 24, and NASA is sharing the birthday love with all of us with a cool new online tool

Called Hubble Birthday, the site asks for the month and day of your birth, then shows you an image the Hubble telescope captured on that day. 

It doesn’t allow you to select your birth year because it’s only programed with one year’s image per date, but the random chance adds to the fun. What were you doing on your fifteenth birthday, or your twenty-sixth birthday? Here’s what the cosmos was doing.

The Hubble Space Telescope, originally just called the Large Space Telescope, according to this anniversary retrospective on Space.com, orbits the earth at a height of 350 miles, allowing scientists a better view of space than they would have from an earth-bound telescope.

In its thirty years, it’s aided in important scientific discoveries, which Space.com summarizes:

“Hubble told scientists that the expansion of the universe is accelerating when they had expected to see it slowing. That realization in turn helped point to mysterious dark energy, a phenomenon astronomers are still wrestling with. The observatory also traced the motion of matter near the center of galaxies, sketching the shadow of supermassive black holes at their hearts. [It also shows] astronomers how galaxies have changed since the earliest days of the cosmos.”

Happy birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope! And happy birthday to all of you — see how the universe looked on your special day here.