Washington - UPI
NASA celebrated the 24th anniversary of the Hubble Space telescope by releasing an image Monday of a cosmic wave taken by the universe's best camera. The Hubble team believes the wave is reminiscent of The Great Wave, a 19th-century print by Katsushika Hokusai, which shows a giant crest bearing down on boats with a view of Mount Fuji in the background. The "wave" is actually hydrogen gas and dust found in the Monkey Head Nebula -- a star-forming region 6,400 light-years away, located in the constellation Orion. The Hubble telescope was launched into space on April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery. Since then it has circled Earth more than 110,000 times and traveled 2.8 billion miles.