NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Is Back In Business

Matt_dk writes "Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a 'perfect 10 both for performance and beauty.' (Meanwhile, the slowly declining Mars Phoenix Lander has now entered safe mode, according to reader CraftyJack.)

Funding to the right place?

[Ngarrang]

And now back to our regularly scheduled program "Diverting Funding from New Space Telescope Technology"

I am your host, Marlin Perkins, and this week, we are sending Jim into space to repair the HST instead of focusing our funding on newer telescope technology.

I understand that the James Webb telescope thingy is not a visible light 'scope. But, do you wonder what kind of HST replacement we could have had already if we had not spent so much time and money on repairs?

Re:how f*cking cool is that picture ?

[Ollabelle]

Yeah, but I'm disappointed NASA didn't post a picture big enough to use as a desktop.

Re:Still blurry

[photonic]

No. Apart from objects that emit at different 'shapes' due to different physics (stellar dust in the infrared, some stars towards UV or X-ray), a star emits more or less in the same 'shape' at all wavelengths. You will see it more blurry at long wavelengths than at shorter onces, but that is due to the diffraction limit [wikipedia.org], but that has nothing to do with focusing. And galaxies do not drift over a span of a few days. You'd be happy if you see a nearby star move by a few arc-seconds over half a year, and those are within our own galaxy. As mentioned before, Hubble has state of the art fine guidance sensors [wikipedia.org], so I do not expect any drift in Hubble either. Overlapping a few images is also easy, you just use a few point like stars that appear in all colors.