Four weeks after space-walking shuttle Endeavour astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1993, an ecstatic Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski waved a Hubble picture of the core of the spiral galaxy M100 at her naysaying colleagues. Today, Mikulski could host a Capitol Hill star party: The orbiting telescope has generated more than 100,000 photos of celestial objects, including a cemetery of dying stars, elephant trunks of dust and hydrogen gas twisting in the Eagle Nebula, jovian storms and aurorae, the rocky rings of Saturn and the colossal supernova smoke rings blown from an exploded star, to list a few. Hubble's pictures do double duty not only as congressional lobbying props, but also as screen savers, T-shirt prints, calendar photos, a background for the "Babylon 5" science fiction TV series and even planet trading cards to be provided soon to schoolchildren.
One of the most electrifying pictures of all, the Hubble Deep Field image began literally as a......
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