Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, these undated images show Saturn (top) and the small spiral galaxy NGC 7742

October 21, 1998
Web posted at: 7:24 a.m. EDT (1124 GMT)

(CNN) -- A new gallery of some of the best pictures of the universe taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, many never before published, is now available on Internet.

NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute announced Tuesday that new picture will be released every month from an archive of more than 130,000 images originally made and stored for scientific research.

New pictures will be posted monthly on the Internet at these addresses:
http://heritage.stsci.edu
http://oposite.stsci.edu/publinfo/1998/28

To start the process, the agencies released four views Wednesday, including a vast field of stars at the hub of the Milky Way galaxy and a bubble of dust and gas formed about a massive hot star and a spiral galaxy.

Web surfers can see a small spiral galaxy called NGC 7742 that scientists think contains a black hole in its core. An area that is actively producing new stars surrounds the core, which looks like the yellow yolk of an egg.

Perhaps most recognizable is a spectacular image of Saturn that has been processed to show an extremely sharp view of the planet in its natural colors. It includes Saturn's familiar rings, which consist mostly of water ice.

To achieve these sharp color images, the Space Telescope Science Institute's image processing specialists combined pictures from many sources of the same objects, then selected the colors that effectively bring out the detail.

"These images communicate, at a visceral level, the awe and excitement that we experience when exploring the universe with Hubble," said Heritage program scientist Keith Noll. "It is our chance to repay the public that supports us."