Seeing again through Hubble's eyes.

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Five grueling space walks in May have transformed the aging--and ailing--Hubble Space Telescope into a brand new observatory. Images and spectra released by NASA on September 9 confirm that two new instruments and two old, revived instruments are working properly. The Wide Field Camera 3, which has begun peering into the cosmos at wavelengths ranging from the infrared to the ultraviolet, captured these two images of a Milky Way star-birthing region in the Carina nebula. The region is similar to that seen in the iconic Pillars of Creation image taken in 1995 by a visible-light camera on Hubble. Recorded in visible light, the left image shows a dusty cloud--a stellar nursery. In the infrared image, on the right, the hatchlings themselves are revealed because the starlight penetrates the dusty cocoon and the cloud itself all but vanishes. The Wide Field Camera 3 is likely to image galaxies more distant than those imaged by any other detector on the ground or in space.