This is both an image that shows my age as well as the hopes and dreams of the time. NASA's "Pillars of Creation" image was among the first images beamed back from the Hubble Space Telescope (which, oddly enough, was the centerpiece of an episode of "Head of the Class" prior to being delivered into orbit by the space shuttle Discovery in 1990). Upon arrival, it was discovered that its 8-foot mirror was distorted due to a manufacturing flaw, leaving the $8 billion satellite to float, almost "blind," in space for years until a 1993 repair mission brought it online. During this time, people wondered what the mission had achieved, why this money had been spent, and how this error could have happened in the first place.
When NASA finally released this image on April 1, 1995, it brought home the bacon, showing viewers an image of the Eagle Nebula, a star-forming patch of space approximately 6,500 light-years from Earth. Within this image, the "pillars" are actually vast clouds of interstellar dust being blown out from nearby stars, each measuring 30 trillion miles in length. This image also demonstrated a small sample of what was out there, what this technology was capable of, offering it at a clarity that was previously unheard of in the days when the nerdiest of us could only dream of an early generation flat screen monitor and high definition televisions were still almost a decade away. This validated NASA's expenses and efforts, showed us something that was previously unimaginable, and demonstrated what might be within reach some day.
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