The Hubble Heritage Project was founded in 1998.
The project was created at the Space Telescope Science Institute by astronomers and image-processing specialists, including Keith Noll, Howard Bond, Forrest Hamilton, Anne Kinney, and Zoltan Levay. Its goal was to turn scientifically valuable Hubble observations into striking public images while preserving the integrity of the underlying data.
Rather than treating the pictures as ordinary snapshots, the team combined exposures taken through different filters. Those monochrome observations were assigned colors and processed into composite images that could reveal structures invisible in a single exposure.
The project released images nearly every month until it ended in 2016. Its work helped popularize Hubble astronomy, and its images appeared in exhibitions, on postage stamps, and across educational outreach. The project’s public images are commonly distributed as JPEG or TIFF files, unlike the underlying scientific archive data, which use FITS.