After being offline for almost a month, the Hubble Space Telescope came back from the sideline to score a perfect 10.

The telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 snapped the image above just days after returning to service in late October. The telescope was sidelined due to a glitch that caused a malfunction to the system that sends commands to the science instruments and formats the instruments’ data for transmission.

The pair of galaxies, which are “gravitationally interacting,” is called Arp 147 and looks like the numeral 10. The blue-colored ring around the galaxy on the right shows the intense star formation occurring around the galaxy. Scientists believe the galaxy on the left actually went through the galaxy on the right, causing the blue ring. The reddish spot to the lower left of the galaxies is believed to be the original nucleus of the galaxy on the right.

More than 400 million light-years from Earth, the galaxies lie in the constellation Cetus, which is near the constellations Aries and Pisces.

As for the telescope itself, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to have Hubble’s other camera – the Advanced Camera for Surveys – to return to service this month. Hubble is currently working on its backup system, so a new backup system is being tested. A mission to install it on Hubble is scheduled for early 2009.

To learn more about the telescope and its latest images, visit http://hubblesite.org/.