English: A short animation of Hubble floating above Earth. I used, greatly modified, and textured the model from this page. Foil normal map is a modified version taken from a Rosetta model from that same website (why reinvent the wheel?). Clouds in the background are Blue Marble clouds.

It's pretty hard to find references of some parts of the real telescope. For instance, to my knowledge, there are no photos with the door open and looking down inside the telescope. Anyway, you can find some other renderings out there and they tend to show the underside of the door as being shiny. I've also seen one with foil inside the tube. You wouldn't want this at all because the light would bounce around and create all sorts of nasty glints and screw up your science. Despite the matte coating, sometimes glints do show up in observations. I've always wondered what path the glints come from.

Except during upgrade missions, that door never shuts. I've heard someone express that maybe if it shuts it will never open again so the risk is never taken. It makes me wonder if they opened the door just as the astronauts were about to leave in case one final space walk was needed to manually lift the thing. Anyway, enough talk about Hubble's door.

Rendered using Blender/Cycles.