Nasa website shows what the Hubble Space Telescope saw on your birthday

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured well over one billion images since it was launched in 1990

Nasa has a new tool to show people what space looked like on their birthday from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website, provided by Nasa and Michigan Technological University, has been taking pictures with the space satellite since 1995.

Nasa estimates that the website had accumulated over one billion images in only 17 years since it started.

The telescope is so powerful that its gaze into space is the equivalent of seeing a “pair of fireflies in Tokyo that are less than 10 feet apart from Washington.”

“Hubble explores the universe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That means it has observed some fascinating cosmic wonder every day of the year, including on your birthday”, the website says.

For people to see what event happened on their birthday, they need to enter the month and day of their birth into the search box. The Hubble Space Telescope will then reveal the image it took on that date.

On 25 December, for example, the Hubble Space Telescope captured the red and blue speckled dwarf galaxy NGC 4214, “ablaze with young stars and gas clouds.”

The image “captures intricate patterns of glowing hydrogen shaped during the star-birthing process, cavities blown clear of gas by stellar winds, and bright stellar clusters.”

The Hubble Space Telescope, sent into space in 1990, will soon be assisted by the James Webb Space Telescope which launched on Christmas Day last year.

Last month, the satellite began its process of unfolding its huge mirror – much larger than that on Hubble, and 100 times more powerful – so that astronomers may gaze back into the earliest stages of the universe after the Big Bang.

By May, humans on Earth should expect to see its first photos, with the telescope expected to remain operational for two decades.