NASA released the second image of the heavens captured by the Hubble Space Telescope since the observatory was placed into orbit, a picture of ancient stars snapped with the telescope's most powerful camera.
"After waiting all these years, it is a very exciting time. We are now ready to start our observations with a tool more powerful than ever before," said Robin Jakobsen of the European Space Agency, which built the camera.The Faint Object Camera, one of six instruments aboard the $1.5 billion telescope, took the 10-minute exposure June 17 as an engineering test of the camera and not to yield any new scientific discoveries.
The black-and-white picture released Friday is of two stars in a star cluster called NGC 188.
The cluster is about 5,000 light years from Earth and is about 12 billion years old.