MAN: Hey, smart people, Joe here.

You are flying through glowing clouds of interstellar gas.

Some say their colors resemble a coral reef in a vast sea of stars.

They're part of a star-forming region in a nearby satellite galaxy to the Milky Way 163,000 light years from Earth.

And though it may look like Hollywood CGI, this image is real, and it was just created to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope.

During the last 30 years, Hubble has completely changed how we view the universe and our place in a cosmos more vast and more astounding than we ever could have imagined.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hubble left Earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990.

The U.S. space program was still feeling the loss of the shuttle Challenger and its seven-person crew just four years earlier.

After 32 months of flights being grounded, it was time for NASA to try something big once again, and this was big.

Putting a telescope the size of a bus into orbit around our planet at about 8 kilometers per second is no easy feat, and things didn't start off smoothly.

When Hubble was deployed, the mirror which aims light into the telescope was warped out of focus by just one 50th the width of a human hair.

The world's most advanced space telescope had blurry vision.

But three years later, astronauts installed corrective optics equipment to offset the error, and its eyes were brought into focus.

Since then, Hubble has been continuously upgraded throughout its time in orbit, giving us an unprecedented view of the universe near and far.

It's shown us auroras dancing on Saturn's poles, the birth of new stars, and a cosmic hourglass blowing the sands of time at 620,000 miles per hour, and even the heart of the Milky Way.

The humid eye can see, at most, around 6,000 stars in the night sky.

From Earth, they appear to twinkle as their light is distorted and blocked by the atmosphere.

But Hubble, sitting above it, has an undistorted view deep into space.

And thanks to this clear view, it was able to put the awe-inspiring scale of the universe in perspective like never before.

This is the Hubble Deep Field, perhaps Hubble's most history-changing image.

It was captured by aiming the telescope here.

No, that's the Big Dipper.

Right there.

Hubble focused on this minuscule pixel of space for six days.

To anyone here on Earth, this looked like an empty void, just darkness.

But through Hubble's eyes, it was everything-- a speck of space no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm's length holding thousands of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.

Hubble's photos are truly works of art, but they don't start off looking like this.

They're the results of sometimes tens of thousands of hours of work by humans and computers to turn this into this.

But just because they're processed and edited doesn't mean they aren't real.

Hubble's instruments record visible, ultraviolet, and near-infrared light.

Think of it like how your TV is able to combine the primary colors of light to paint an entire image showing a whole rainbow of colors.

An image from Hubble works the same way.

It filters light from various points across the electromagnetic spectrum to only observe slices of color, which are assembled on Earth into multicolored images.

Astronomers often focus on very narrow slivers of light, which can represent individual chemical elements, molecular signatures, temperatures, densities, even how fast things are moving because different wavelengths of light can teach us different things about the cosmos.

These are the pillars of creation, an active star-forming region in the Eagle Nebula, as seen in visible light.

And here they are in near-infrared, just past the red end of the spectrum.

Near-infrared light can penetrate more of the cocoons of gas and dust that surround forming stars, revealing objects that are obscured if we only look at the range of human vision.

This expanded vision lets us see this, a blue haze, stellar material being heated up and blown away by intense radiation.

Comparing these two different views allowed scientists to discover that the pillars of creation are also home to destruction.

And by dividing the light from the Crab Nebula into narrow bands, Hubble scientists were able to detect spectral fingerprints of hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen glowing thousands of light years away.

Although Hubble is able to look at these very narrow slices of the sky, we can also assemble remarkably larger views to tell a bigger story, the way the letters on a page combine to make a poem.

This view of the Andromeda Galaxy is a composite of 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings, creating an image filled with billions of pixels of starlight.

Even though these observations look like works of art, the night sky is not just a flat canvas painted with constellations.

Something is missing from even Hubble's most detailed images: depth.

Hubble's visualization experts wanted to change that and shift our perspective to experience the universe not as it looks, but in the three-dimensional way it really is.

This is Orion's belt, and that is Sirius, the brightest star in our night sky.

But watch what happens when we view the image this way.

Sirius isn't really the brightest star of them all.

It's just reasonably bright and reasonably close to it.

A flat view from our vantage point doesn't tell the whole story.

This is where computer modeling has really transformed astronomy.

Intricate software analyzes an image, like this one from Hubble, and recreates it using digital stars.

Data about the stars' true brightness and size gives us an idea of the stars' relative positions to each other, allowing us to map the synthetic stars in three dimensions.

Even their color comes into play.

As the universe expands, space itself expands too.

And as light travels through this space, it gets stretched out by that expansion and it's color-shifted more towards the red end of the spectrum.

That means farther away objects look redder.

After reconstructing a three-dimensional slice of the cosmos in a computer, we can separate stars by color or see which ones are the brightest, like this.

We can even use this software to remove stars in the foreground and gain a clearer view of what's obscured behind them.

Combining all this data, stacking all of these slices of light, we can build the scene, adding real three-dimensional depth to views of stellar dust and gas so we can more accurately model how it behaves and interacts-- highs and lows, gradients and densities.

We can carve out valleys, dive inside of them, peer under shock waves to reveal nurseries of newborn planets.

Hubble has photographed thousands of galaxies outside our own.

And using these tools, we've learned that they're not islands isolated and separate from one another.

Rather, they interact in billion-year timescales.

Hubble's data lets us watch eons of cosmic tug of war unfold in a single minute of video.

Creating just one frame of this can take three hours of computing time.

We can even model what our own galaxy might look like in 3.75 billion years when our nearest neighbor, Andromeda, gets too close.

This is CGI, yes, but it's not the work of our imaginations.

In a way, it's even more than we could imagine, thanks to the work of one special telescope 568 kilometers above us.

Hubble doesn't just let us see into the future of the cosmos, it takes us on a journey through the past, through the history of everything.

And these tiny, red dots hiding among more than 10,000 galaxies are perhaps the most amazing thing on that journey that Hubble has ever seen-- galaxies from the dawn of the universe.

The light from these galaxies in the deepest reaches of Hubble's view takes more than 10 billion years to make its journey.

This ancient light reveals them as they were just 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Hubble is more than a telescope.

It's a time machine that lets us watch galaxies evolve and change over our universe's history.

It's a window into the history of the universe itself.

Saying there are tens of billions of galaxies is hard for our brains to understand, but flying through a portion of them brings that vastness into view.

It's emotional and unbelievable.

It makes us feel tiny, alone, and at the same time, connected to everything else on this insignificant rock and everything that lies beyond.

Hubble's images, and those who work with them, have changed our place in space.

Stay curious.

[MUSIC PLAYING] WOMAN: I want the stale, billion-year-old starlight of a distant galaxy to be your reward.

I want to utterly disorient you and let you navigate back by the stars.

I want you to lose yourself and find it again, not just here, but everywhere, in everything.

I want you to believe that the universe is a vast, random, uncaring place in which our species, our world, has absolutely no significance.

And I want you to believe that the only response is to make our own beauty and meaning and to share it while we can.

I want to make you wonder what is out there, what dreams may come in waves of radiation across the breadth of an endless expanse-- what we may know, given time, and what splendors might never, ever reach us.

I want to make it mean something to you that you are in the cosmos, that you are of the cosmos, that you are born from stardust and to stardust you will return, that you are a way for the universe to be in awe of itself.

HOST: What you just heard was part of a poem by my friend, astrophysicist Katie Mack.

And if you want to learn more about the future of the universe, her new book, The End of Everything, Astrophysically Speaking, will be dropping in August.

Keep looking up.