Nasa's new tool can show you how space looked on your birthday - here's how

Astronomy Picture of the Day has more than one billion images, collected by the Hubble Space Telescope

Galaxy NGC 4845, 65 million light years from Earth, in the Virgo constellation, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in January. The dust-mottled disc around the glowing centre signifies a black holShow more

Nasa's website now allows people to see what space looked like on the day they were born.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been taking pictures since 1995, and Nasa and the Michigan Technological University are now uploading them to the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.

More than a billion images have been accumulated on the website, Nasa estimates, and users can now search their date of birth to see the image the telescope took of space on that day.

“Hubble explores the universe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That means it has observed some fascinating cosmic wonder every day of the year, including on your birthday”, the website says.

For example, if you were to search December 25, Christmas Day, you will see an image the telescope captured of the red and blue speckled dwarf galaxy NGC 4214, “ablaze with young stars and gas clouds.” The picture “captures intricate patterns of glowing hydrogen shaped during the star-birthing process, cavities blown clear of gas by stellar winds, and bright stellar clusters.”

The telescope is so powerful that its view of space is the equivalent of seeing a “pair of fireflies in Tokyo that are less than 10 feet apart from Washington,” the website explains.

In January, the telescope captured a rare image of three galaxies possibly interacting with each other. Collectively known as NGC 7764A, the galaxy cluster is about 425 million light years from Earth.

It is in the Phoenix constellation, named after a mythical bird that is consumed by fire and then reborn from the ashes.

The European Space Agency said the image gives the impression that the two galaxies in the upper right-hand side of the frame are interacting with one another.

Interactions between galaxies are common and happen when they drift too close to each other, causing their gravitational fields to be disturbed. A major interaction would be when galaxies eventually collide, allowing the larger one to destroy the smaller one, and ultimately forming a much larger galaxy.

Astronomers have predicted that the Milky Way galaxy, home to Earth, will collide with the larger neighbouring Andromeda galaxy about four billion years from now.