IMAGES of the violent births and deaths of stars and new evidence of super massive black holes were among the first pictures provided yesterday by the upgraded Hubble Space Telescope.
Three months after a space walking repair call by shuttle astronauts, scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) offered a progress report on how the orbiting telescope is adapting to its new equipment.
"With these images, we are lifting the dusty veil of secrecy from star birth and star death," Mr Rodger Thompson, chief scientist for the newly installed Near Infrared Camera and Multi Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), said at a briefing.
"We are now ready to move along to even more distant cosmological challenges."
Because NICMOS looks at infrared light, not visible light as a standard telescope does, it can peer through interstellar dust to see the rollicking star nursery in the Orion nebula, located in the sword of the constellation Orion.
What had looked like pastel clouds in earlier Hubble images of the star birth area of the nebula shows up in the infra red pictures as a jeweltoned area of clumps, bubbles and knots of material ejected from huge young stars into the surrounding molecular cloud.
NICMOS also peeked into the heart of the Egg nebula, a dust and gas cloud about 3,000 light years - 18 quadrillion miles (29 quadrillion km) - from Earth, to see a dying star blasting twin jets of gas and dust into space.
Another new Hubble instrument, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), discovered a monstrous black hole that had at least 300 million times the mass of Earth's Sun, at the centre of a galaxy known as M84, in the constellation Virgo.
Black holes are believed to exist at the heart of galaxies but because of their nature - they suck in everything around them, including light - they cannot be photographed in the conventional sense of the word.
The scientists acknowledged the orbiting telescope will not be up to full strength for several months and that one of three newly installed infrared cameras - part of the $105 million NICMOS instrument - may never focus properly.
Camera Three developed distorted vision soon after its February installation when a block of supercold nitrogen, which was meant to cool the instrument over its 4 1/2 year lifespan, thawed faster than expected.
Now the scientists believe the instrument may function as briefly as 18 months to two years and so they plan to increase the percentage of time NICMOS is used.
Mr Ed Weiler, Hubble's chief astronomer, said that the camera has been correcting its focus slowly and irregularly over the last weeks and may eventually focus as originally intended. Astronomers will check it again in about six months, he said.
Even if it never works properly, Mr Weiler said it only accounts for 6 percent of Hubble's scientific operations.
The $3 billion Hubble telescope, launched in 1990, encountered early problems with its main mirror, which required a repair mission in 1993.