The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most illuminating and awe-inspiring inventions, capturing the beauty of the universe with its massive lenses as it orbits the Earth day in and day out.
The telescope run jointly by NASA and ESA has been almost constantly in operation since it launched in April 1990, taking in galaxies and nebulae and all sorts of far-away space objects. No matter when your birthday lands on the calendar (except if it’s on Leap Day, sorry), Hubble has an impressive image that it captured on one of those days over the last 31 years.
In 2020, NASA published a page on its site where you can input a month and a date and it serves you a spacey image captured on that day.
Just enter in your birth month and date and NASA will serve up an image Hubble snapped on that day during any one of its 30-plus years in orbit.
Image: screenshot: NAsa
Along with each image, NASA provides the year that it was captured and a short description of what it is you’re looking at. Some of the images are pretty easy to parse, like spiral galaxies, whereas others require a bit of reading to understand, like an infrared view of our own Milky Way galaxy. You can also click the “More info” link to check out a much more in-depth explanation of each image.
The edge of galaxy NGC 4710 was captured by Hubble on Jan. 15, 2006.
Image: nasa / esa / P. Goudfrooij
After finding your own birthday space image, you can just hit the little red X at the top right corner of the image to search other dates.