Butterfly Nebula voted favourite 2020 Hubble image, NASA says 'excellent choice'

NASA on December 31 announced that the most favourite Hubble image for Instagram users in 2020 was the picture of NGC 6302, which is also known as the Butterfly Nebula. Earlier this week, NASA, in one of its stories, asked Instagram users to vote for their favourite Hubble image of 2020. The American space agency has now revealed that netizens on the popular social media platform unanimously voted for the Butterfly Nebula image to take the title. 

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"This week, you voted in our stories to decide our Instagram audience’s favorite 2020 Hubble image! The winner was this image of NGC 6302, also known as the Butterfly Nebula. Excellent choice!" NASA said in its post while resharing the Butterfly Nebula image on Thursday. Instagram users flooded the post with likes and comments as they shared their take on the image and why they voted for it to be their top choice. One individual dubbed the image as an "intergalactic butterfly".  

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NASA celebrated 30th anniversary of Hubble in 2020

In 2020, as NASA celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Hubble telescope in space, it graced social media with several stunning images of galaxies, including some sonification videos that had digital data transformed into sound. The two sonification videos that went viral last year were of the Crab Nebula and Helix Nebula. While the sonification music of Crab Nebula sounded to netizens like Interstellar movie's background score, Helix Nebula managed to scare many on social media with its music that sounded like it had come straight out of a horror movie. 

Read: NASA Shares Mesmerising Sonification Video Of Crab Nebula; Netizens Call It 'breathtaking'

The Hubble Space Telescope of NASA, which captures data and sent it back to Earth, was deployed 30 years ago by the space shuttle Discovery. The space observatory has been named after astronomer Edwin Hubble and since its launch in 1990, it has made more than 1.4 million observations. 

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