Second First Light: Hubble Revives, Sends Proof – Beautiful Proof

NASA stated a week ago that it had revived the Hubble Space Telescope’s B-Side Data Formatter that translates instrument speak into spacecraft uplink/downlink speak and that it had also awakened the slumbering Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Just in time for Halloween, NASA released this photo of Arp 147:

This picture shows “a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies” in NASA speak. It appears that the galaxy in the center of the image has passed straight through the galaxy on the right, blowing a perfect hole through the rightmost galaxy’s center. Hubble has photographed this galaxy before so NASA used this shot to grade WFPC2’s operational status after all the hullabaloo over lost the data formatter and the two instrument restarts. In NASA speak: “The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline…” (See Wikipedia’s definition of "first light.")