This is an image of spiral galaxy M100 taken in 1993 with Hubble's Wide Field/Planetary Camera 1, which was part of an original suite of instruments launched aboard Hubble in 1990. Because of a manufacturing flaw in the primary mirror, which created an optical effect called spherical aberration, the galaxy appears blurred because it cannot be brought into a single focus. In particular, the orange foreground star below image center has tentacle-like image artifacts that are clear evidence of spherical aberration, where the starlight is not concentrated into a single point.
