Dazzling video celebrates 25 years of Hubble Telescope

(WTVQ Social) – In honor of the Hubble Telescope’s 25th anniversary on April 24, NASA released a virtual 3-D ride through space. The visualization takes you to a breeding ground for stars 20,000 light-years away from Earth. The little red dots in the video are new stars wrapped in gas-and-dust cocoons, NASA explained.

Specifically, the flight goes through a cluster of stars called the Westerlund 2 that was discovered in the 1960s. It is located in the Gum 29 nebula in the Carina constellation, NASA said in a press release.

The cluster is about 6 and 13 light-years across and is about 2 million years old. In space terms, those are baby stars, NASA said.

NASA clarified that the video is a scientific representation meant to show what the cluster looks like in 3-D.

"Note that the visualization is intended to be a scientifically reasonable interpretation and that distances within the model are significantly compressed," the video description reads.

The Hubble Telescope, the first major optical telescope in space, is an international cooperation operated out of Maryland. It does not travel to far away places, NASA explained. Instead it gathers and archives its high-tech images from its orbit near Earth.

It first launched on April 24, 1990. Since then, it has made 1.2 million observations of distance stars, planets in our solar system and everywhere in between.