ann2403 — Announcement

Announcement of the 2025 ESA Hubble and Webb Calendar

12 December 2024

To celebrate another year of exciting images and discoveries from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb have released a new calendar for 2025 that showcases beautiful imagery from both missions.

The 2025 calendar features a selection of images from Press Releases (from Hubble and Webb), Hubble Pictures of the Week and Webb Pictures of the Month published throughout 2024. These include imagery of planets, star clusters, galaxies, and more. It can now be accessed electronically for anyone to print, share and enjoy (please see the links provided below).

The images featured in the calendar are as follows:

Cover: Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud lies the young star cluster NGC 602 where star formation is ongoing. This image highlights the cluster stars, the young stellar objects, and the surrounding gas and dust ridges, while also showing background galaxies and other stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

January: The giant planet Jupiter, in all its banded glory, is revisited by Hubble in this image taken on 6 January 2024. A pair of battling storms are visible right of centre, a deep red cyclone and a reddish anticyclone. To the left of the planet its volcanic moon Io appears.

February: This sharpest-ever infrared view of the famous Horsehead Nebula from Webb shows the depth and complexity of the thick clumps of material like never before. Also featured are Hubble’s 23rd anniversary image, and one of the first images from ESA’s Euclid telescope.

March: The two bright ‘eyes’ and semi-circular ‘smile’ in the Webb image of this spiral galaxy are the result of an off-centre collision by the elliptical galaxy now seen here to its left. A tenuous gas bridge runs between the galaxies, together known as Arp 107. 

April: M76, the colourful Little Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula created by a collapsing red giant star. Hot, vibrant gases are propelled outwards by the now white-dwarf’s stellar winds; the red colour is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen. Hubble turned to this favourite target of amateur astronomers for its 34th anniversary in April 2024.

May: This is NGC 5253, a starburst galaxy filled with extraordinary star clusters and continually forming stars. Hubble’s image reveals super star clusters lurking in its core amongst dark dust clouds. As a dwarf galaxy, it resembles ancient galaxies and is a laboratory to study star and galaxy evolution.

June: Among the many massive galaxies of the lensing galaxy cluster shown here, SPT-CL J0615−5746, lies the Cosmic Gems arc. An infant galaxy from just 460 million years after the Big Bang, it is visible thanks to strong gravitational lensing by the cluster. Astronomers are using Webb to map its inner workings.

July: R Aquarii is a binary star system surrounded by a large, dynamic nebula. Outbursts eject powerful jets, forming loops and trails as plasma emerges in streamers. They are energised by blistering radiation from the stellar duo to glow in visible light.

August: A stunning mosaic of images from Webb showcases the nearby star-forming cluster, NGC 1333, in the Perseus molecular cloud. Large patches of orange represent gas glowing in the infrared as ionised material ejected from young stars collides with the surrounding cloud. They are hallmarks of a very active site of star formation.

September: Omega Centauri is the brightest, largest, and most massive Milky Way globular cluster known. This image shows the depth and extent of its population of stars. In 2024 astronomers found new evidence in Hubble data that it hides an intermediate-mass black hole at its centre.

October: The Serpens Nebula is home to a particularly dense cluster of newly forming stars. This Webb image shows the nebula’s centre. Filaments and wisps of different hues represent reflected starlight from still-forming protostars within the cloud; dust in front of that reflection appears in an orange, diffuse shade.

November: Hubble continued its long run of capturing beautiful celestial objects in fine colour and detail in 2024, and this year as ever, many were spiral galaxies. Seen here are NGC 4951, NGC 3810, NGC 3783 and Messier 90, gems from a treasure trove of new Hubble observations.

December: Westerlund 1 is one of our galaxy’s few remaining super star clusters. Its large, dense, and diverse population of massive stars is unrivalled in the Milky Way galaxy. Webb can pierce the dense dust surrounding it and study its population of lower-mass stars.

Please note that hard copies are not available directly from ESA/Hubble/Webb. We invite you to avail yourself of the free calendar formats below.

Links

• Print-Ready 2025 Calendar File
• High Resolution Digital 2025 Calendar File
• Low Resolution Digital 2025 Calendar File
• 2024 ESA/Hubble/Webb Calendar
• 2023 ESA/Hubble/Webb Calendar
• 2022 ESA/Hubble Calendar
• 2021 ESA/Hubble Calendar
• 2020 ESA/Hubble Calendar

Contacts

Bethany Downer
ESA/Webb & ESA/Hubble Chief Science Communications Officer
E-mail: [email protected]