NASA Hubble Space Telescope Shares Festive Photo of Snowman Nebula

Before the Christmas season, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this fantastic photograph of a portion of the Snowman Nebula.

The Snowman Nebula lies 6,000 light-years away in the vast southern constellation Puppis, according to SciNews.

Because it includes ionized hydrogen, this object, also known as LBN 1046, is categorized as an emission nebula.

Emission nebulae are diffuse clouds of gas that the energy of neighboring giant stars has charged to the point that they now emit their own light.

Hubble Space Telescope Greets Snowman Nebula, Other Nebulae At Hello

The image merely shows a small portion of the nebula's overall form. The Hubble scientists shared the additional image below to show how this image fits into the overall context of the nebula:

The nebula is seen in its completeness in the smaller picture on the left. It features two spherical lobes, one of which is significantly bigger than the other.

With the appearance of a snowman on its side, this structure gave the nebula its name.

The Snowman appears to be a dual-lobed ball of gas when viewed through a telescope on Earth.

According to Hubble scientists (via NASA), the subtleties of sweeping arcs of luminous gas and black knots of dust in a tiny area of the nebula are captured in this Hubble Space Telescope photograph.

The Snowman is also known as Sharpless 2-302. It is one of the objects in astronomer Stewart Sharpless's inventory of mainly emission nebulae that he assembled to locate interstellar ionized hydrogen, or HII regions.

Meanwhile, as the month of Nebula November continues, additional photographs of stunning nebulae are expected. A beautiful Hubble photograph of a disintegrating Wolf-Rayet star, WR 124, was published by NASA yesterday. Take a peek below.

About Hubble Space Telescope

Since October 23, the Hubble Space Telescope has been in 'safe mode.' All of its science equipment was turned down and unavailable for observations.

Engineers have now put one instrument back online, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and have resumed science observations.

According to NASA (via Science Times), engineers are currently looking into the problem. The other four instruments are still offline.

SciTechDaily said Hubble has recently had a slew of technical issues. A faulty primary computer forced operators to move to a backup copy in June of this year, resulting in five weeks of downtime.

The spacecraft was taken offline for a few days in March 2021 due to a software upgrade issue. This may be expected with the deteriorating observatory.

Hubble has been in orbit since 1990 and has changed the way we think about the universe.

The observatory has been refurbished since it debuted. Thanks to five maintenance trips by Space Shuttle, astronauts to repair and replace equipment on the telescope, including all five of the major instruments.

However, Hubble's last servicing trip was in 2009, and his age is beginning to show.

According to NASA, the mission team has been researching the underlying cause of the synchronization challenges for the past week and has found no new concerns.

This week, the team will continue to investigate potential short-term solutions and produce implementation estimates.

Once this is accomplished, the team will explore restarting science observations and returning the remaining equipment to an operational state.

Check out more news and information on Space in Science Times.