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This beautiful image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope may look peaceful, but it shows the galaxy NGC 1385, located about 68 million light-years away in a constellation named Fire: Fornax, which means “furnace” in Latin.
“The constellation was named Fornax by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer born in 1713,” write the Hubble scientists. “Lacaille named 14 of the 88 constellations that we still recognize today. He seems to have had a penchant for naming constellations after scientific instruments, notably Atlia (the air pump), Norma (the ruler or square) and Telescopium (the telescope). Lacaille spotted this particular constellation during a trip to the Cape of Good Hope in 1751, and he decided to give it the name of a chemist’s oven in honor of the work done by chemists of the time.
As for Hubble, that big old telescope has been having a hard time lately, as it suffered from a computer error that caused all of its science instruments to automatically switch to safe mode, during which they don’t collect any data. After a quick troubleshooting from the ground, engineers determined that the problem was with a piece of hardware that controls scientific instruments, called the Scientific Instrument Data Processing and Control Unit (SI C&DH), and its control system. power supply, the power control unit (PCU).
Fortunately, Hubble offers backup hardware in case an error like this occurs. After careful testing and preparation, the team was able to switch to this backup hardware and get Hubble back up and running.
At over 30 years old, Hubble is aging and these kinds of mistakes are to be expected. This is one of the reasons NASA is planning to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which will succeed Hubble, in the near future.
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