EARTH ORBIT — NASA released a composite image featuring four photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 2025, marking the observatory's 35th anniversary. The telescope launched into space on April 24, 1990, according to NASA.

The anniversary composite combined four separate Hubble photographs: Mars in the top left, the planetary nebula NGC 2899 in the top right, the Rosette Nebula in the bottom left, and the spiral galaxy NGC 5335 in the bottom right. Each year, NASA shares a photograph taken by Hubble to celebrate the telescope's launch anniversary.

Over its 35 years of operation, Hubble has made more than 1.7 million observations, according to NASA. Scientists have published more than 22,000 studies using data from the telescope, which orbits the Earth at an altitude of approximately 340 miles.

The tradition of anniversary images has produced a catalog of cosmic subjects spanning planets, nebulae, and galaxies. For the telescope's 34th anniversary in 2024, NASA shared an image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, located 3,400 light-years away in the Perseus constellation, which features a red giant star collapsing into a white dwarf. The 33rd anniversary image in 2023 captured the nebula NGC 1333 in the Perseus molecular cloud, about 960 light-years away.

In 2022, Hubble's 32nd anniversary photograph showed a collection of five galaxies known as the Hickson Compact Group 40, which will eventually merge together in about 1 billion years. The 31st anniversary in 2021 featured the star AG Carinae, surrounded by clouds of gas and dust. For the 30th anniversary in 2020, the Hubble team released an image titled "Cosmic Reef," showing two nebulae in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies located 163,000 light-years away.

Earlier anniversary releases included the Southern Crab Nebula in 2019, featuring a double star composed of a red giant and a white dwarf at its center, and the Lagoon Nebula in 2018, which measures 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall and was first cataloged by Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna in 1654. For the 27th anniversary in 2017, four photos were combined into one image showing the galaxies NGC 4302 and NGC 4298, photographed with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The 26th anniversary image in 2016 showed a bubble nebula located between 7,000 and 11,000 light-years away.

For the 25th anniversary in 2015, NASA released a photograph of Westerlund 2, a cluster of about 3,000 stars located 20,000 light-years away. The 20th anniversary image in 2010 captured pillars of gas in the Carina Nebula where stars are born. The 18th anniversary in 2008 saw the release of 59 images of colliding galaxies, which at the time marked the largest simultaneous release of Hubble images to the public. The 15th anniversary image in 2005 showed a tower of gas and dust rising 9.5 light-years from the Eagle Nebula, and the 14th anniversary in 2004 featured the Lindsay-Shapley Ring Galaxy.