Somewhere out in orbit, a telescope was working on your birthday. It has worked on every birthday you've ever had.
The Hubble Space Telescope explores the universe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That means that on any given date, it was pointed at something: a distant galaxy, a glowing nebula, a cluster of stars too far away to comprehend. NASA built a tool that lets you find out exactly what.
Here's all you do: enter a month and day. That's it. No account, no year, no form. The tool returns five Hubble observations taken on that date, and you can share your favorite result straight to social media.
The current version is an expanded edition of a tool NASA first launched in 2020. The original showed one image per day. This one shows five, so you get a much wider look at what the universe was doing on your date.
Don't just try yours. NASA says it works for anniversaries, graduations, or any memorable occasion. Type in the day you got married, the day your kid was born, the day you lost someone. Every date has an answer.
There's one honest catch, and NASA is upfront about it. Hubble sometimes needs to take exposures over multiple days to collect enough light from faraway objects. So one of your birthday images might also show up on a neighboring date. That's not a glitch. It's what it takes to photograph something billions of light years away.
It takes about ten seconds. You'll walk away with a picture of something enormous and ancient that happened to be in view of a telescope on your day.