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Space Science

Hubble's Upgrade: Pretty Pictures 235

Posted by michael from the say-cheese dept.
EReidJ writes "The Hubble Space Telescope has come out with astonishing new pictures, our "deepest glimpse[s] into the depths of space and time". An article on the photos is here. These are striking in their beauty, and are sure to become commonplace desktop images in the next month. The official site to view all of the photos is here, but the site's already going pretty slow. washingtonpost.com has the four photos in series on its home page." There are also stories on space.com and MSNBC.
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Hubble's Upgrade: Pretty Pictures More

Hubble's Upgrade: Pretty Pictures

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  • Nerd pr0n ;) (Score:5, Informative)

    by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:42PM (#3437364)
    Neat! Also noteworthy is apod [nasa.gov], Astronomy Picture of the Day, which also has a brief explanation of all the stuff they post. Of course, most of those pictures are as much a work of human art as photos, since few of the pictures are made of stuff in the visible spectrum, so all those vibrant colours are quite fake. Still looks nice, though. :)
    • Yes - I agree. I went on an astronomy weekend a while ago. There were various talks with slides. One of the things they mentioned was even if you're not interested in astronomy that much the pictures are astounding.
      • The cosmologists I work with are often less astounded by the "cool" pictures, and more astounded by the "boring" pictures. While I'm looking at two galaxies coliding or some beautiful nebula, they're looking at some mostly empty portion of the photograph. Then they point at a small dot in a black wasteland and say "Wow, can you believe how *red* that is!". =-)

        -Paul Komarek
        • "Wow, can you believe how *red* that is!".

          Figures. Damned cosmetologists.

          • "Figures. Damned cosmetologists."

            A friend in astronomy has had many troubles getting her parents' friends (among many others) to understand that she is not an astrologer. It was bad enough for her (and probably other astro students) as an undergrad that one year the annual Physics and Astronomy Picnic was advertised as the "Psychics and Astrologers picnic".

            cosmologist/cosmotologist is a nice addition. =-)

            -Paul Komarek

  • Amazing, and just a little scary... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuantumFTL ( 197300 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:43PM (#3437372)
    Does anyone else just feel absolutely tiny when they find thousands of entire galaxies in a small patch of the sky? Galaxies contain billions of stars, and God knows how many planets... Kinda makes the silly things we argue about here on slashdot seem just that- silly.

    Just a thought.

    • Yeah, though I don't think you even need to look to other galaxies. When you look at how tiny the Earth is when compared to our Solar System, you realize that everything that man as ever accomplished (with the exception of a few space probes) is confined to a tiny speck of dust adrift in an endless sea. Still though, rather than making me feel insignificant, I am in awe of all the wonders we have yet to discover.
      • I second this. When I was young I remember National Geographic doing special on the universe, I think it may have been when the Hubbel was first launched. There was this pull-out map of the universe showing at various levels our position in the solar system, the Milky Way and the universe as a whole. It makes you feel small, but there it so much new stuff to learn.

      • And if you want to feel even more insignifigant... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DG ( 989 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:15PM (#3437577) Homepage Journal
        Consider this:

        Homo Sapiens has been running around for roughly 200,000 years.

        We've had the ability to reach space for roughly 50 years.

        We've been able to fly for about 100 years - incidently, we visited all the places on the planet at about the same time.

        The first demonstration of the incandescent light bulb was roughly 120 years ago.

        The first steam engine was 220 years ago.

        The entire North American continent was unknown to Europeans 600 years ago.

        The earliest known forms of writing date to about 5500 years ago.

        Not only are we small, we're brief too.

        DG
    • Does anyone else just feel absolutely tiny...

      And still my SETI@Home finds nothing.

      --
      "If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space."
      • As just a point to ponder, some of these galaxies are 14 billion years old now, the light from their formation is just now reaching us. So they've had 14 billion years to form, develop, and die. The chances that were are in the right place at the right time to catch any information about whatever civilizations grew up there is miniscule. How much longer will it take for us to detect information moving slower than the speed of light? We, as a race, may be long dead before some alien race detects signs of our civilization.

        Kintanon
    • Kinda makes the silly things we argue about here on slashdot...

      NO IT DOESN'T!

      :P

    • Re:Amazing, and just a little scary... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...and a good thought it is...have you ever read, "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan? Here is a relevant quote from that book:

      "The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers
      of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and
      triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
      Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of
      this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner,
      how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one
      another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined
      self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the
      Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light."

      -- Carl Sagan

      "...billions and billions and billions..."

      -- Carl Sagan

    • Total Perspective Vortex (Score:5, Funny)

      by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:19PM (#3437606) Journal

      To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from say, one small piece of fairy cake.

      The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

      Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

      And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

      "Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

      And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.

      And into one end he plugged the whole reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

      To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford is a sense of proportion.

      -- from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

    • Can we have your liver then? (Score:5, Funny)

      by jdcook ( 96434 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:57PM (#3437945)
      Obligatory Python lyric:

      (spoken)
      Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
      And things seem hard or tough,
      And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
      (sung)
      And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,

      Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
      And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
      It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
      The sun that is the source of all our power.
      Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
      Are moving at a million miles a day,
      In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
      Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

      Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
      It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
      It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
      But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
      We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
      We go 'round every two hundred million years;
      And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
      In this amazing and expanding universe.

      (waltz)

      Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
      In all of the directions it can whiz;
      As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
      Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
      So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
      How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
      And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
      'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!

    • Recipe for a fun-filled weekend of nihilistic fun:

      1. Procure a few dried grams of mushrooms of psychedelic variety
      2. Grab a buddy or two
      3. Head out to the country on a clear night
      4. Lay on your back and contemplate the vastness unfolding before your eyes and inside your brain
      5. Achieve philosophical enlightment (optional)

      Astromony and psychedelics go together like peantut butter & jelly, I tell you whut. I have done this a few times, and it's the only time in my life I've come close to having a religious experience.

    • No matter what we do, the universe is either going to die a cold death where nothing can survive, or contract onto itself and undergo another big bang. So, nothing you do will be recorded forever.

      Unless, of course we undertake a massive project with our universe coinhabitants to alter the local density of a region of space so we can all survive a cold death. (see Contact, the *book*)

      Study science.
      • Unless, of course we undertake a massive project with our universe coinhabitants to alter the local density of a region of space so we can all survive a cold death. (see Contact, the *book*)

        See also Frederick Pohl's Gateway series.
      • What makes you think that the 'string' or whatever you think the universe would colapse to wouldn't contain information which a capable diety would be able to use to create the "universe" at any point in time? I think it is possible that it could, however, I also understand that the converse would be also possible considering what we really know about the super big, the super small, and what happens when both happen at the same time.
        • What makes you think that the 'string' or whatever you think the universe would colapse to wouldn't contain information which a capable diety would be able to use to create the "universe" at any point in time?

          Occam's Razor. Sure, it's possible, but we have no testable evidence of an extra-dimentional 'capable diety' at this point. We'll need some evidence to think that. Random quantum fluctuations and the laws of thermodynamics would make any reconstruction difficult, but if there's an all-powerful diety that wouldn't stop her.

          The argument is probably not worth having though, because the evidence from the redshift from supernovae in distant galaxies shows that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion. Noone knows what quintessence force might be causing this yet, but the testable evidence is fairly conclusive.
    • feh, you don't need billions of stars to make what we argue about around here seem silly and insignificant.

  • This place has more room than it looks like (Score:4, Funny)

    by asmithmd1 ( 239950 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:44PM (#3437380) Homepage Journal
    This from a caption of one of the pictures "Surprisingly, about 6,000 newly spotted galaxies are in the background of this image."
    OK the universe is bigger than I thought

  • wow! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by BennyTheBall ( 575374 )

    This is a great example of the astonishing beauty in science!

    when nothing brainy to say, say something nice

    • dont see any scientific beauty there... I only see the beauty of Nature and the Universe..

      Now how the light refracts off the lens... that is scientific beauty.

  • Mirror of Images (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cybersonic ( 7113 ) <ralph@ralph.cx> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:46PM (#3437396) Homepage
    Go here [ralph.cx]... Ill get as many as i can, these are sweet :)

  • Direct Link to Good Slide Show (Score:4, Informative)

    by EReidJ ( 551124 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:46PM (#3437397) Homepage
    Here's MSNBC's slide-show of high-res pics:

    http://www.msnbc.com/c/0/77/999/ssMain.asp?fmt=Chi ld&0ss=N%r0077999 [msnbc.com]

    It's going pretty fast still, and MSNBC did a serious upgrade for the Olympics, so I doubt it will get Slashdotted.

  • Unfortunately space.com's "universal viewer" didn't work too well with Konqueror (javascript problems?) - but that tadpole galaxy [space.com] picture is amazing! And 10 times
    faster than the old camera, so they can do one of these every day?!

  • Correct Photo? (Score:3, Funny)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:49PM (#3437417) Homepage Journal
    I'm wondering if the space.com photo of "the mice" galaxies is the right picture.

    Looks a lot like a cut from a film I watched in health class in the 6th grade.

    .
    • I'm wondering if the space.com photo of "the mice" galaxies is the right picture.

      Looks a lot like a cut from a film I watched in health class in the 6th grade.

      Funny, yes, but this comment also points out an interesting truth about the physical world. There are many structures out there that are remarkably similar to structures on vastly different scales. Galaxies can look a lot like bacterial infections. The fractal nature of the universe is a fascinating subject. A good overview can be found in this report [aps.org] on a talk by Dr. Richard Voss.
  • BBC has it too [bbc.co.uk], with pictures.

  • funding (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:52PM (#3437432) Homepage Journal
    Hubble pictures! I think we all like Hubble pictures. And why shouldn't we? Curiosity is one of those things that makes humans...human!

    Sadly, despite the continuing stream of succesful discoveries and experiments (not to mention missions in space!), NASA continues to suffer from a lack of funding [slashdot.org]. Even when NASA saves our asses once again [slashdot.org], they must struggle to get the money they deserve.

    I think we all must ask ourselves what are priorities are. Are we going to forego all of the useful functions of Society, including welfare, affirmative action, and the right for a Woman to Choose, just so we can look at these pretty pictures? Is taxing the hell out of science fiction fans (previous slashdot story, can't seem to find it, sorry) worth satisfying our silly human curiosity?

    Well, curiosity it is that has driven all of the advances of Mankind, from the earliest primitive tools to the Crucifiction of Jesus to the Constitution of the United States. Human ingenuity has always triumphed. And this case is no different.

    You know what choice to make...we all do. Generations from now, our descendents will remember Earth, the USA, and NASA, where it all started. They will be thankful. And that is the greatest reward I could ever wish for.


    • NASA is an industrial subsidy in disguise. At least that's what this article [theonion.com] from The Onion says.

    • Asteroid collisions are a major issue. We've had a few fairly close calls in the last few years, and it's a bit spooky. All it would take is one big one to wipe our race out of existence. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when, and when could be two weeks from now. Hell, one of the closest approaches in recent history happened just a few months ago, and we didn't even see it until AFTER it had passed, because it was coming from the direction of the sun.

      NASA has got to get funded for this, and the U.S. shouldn't have to pick up the entire tab. Other industrial nations should chip in, as it would be saving the entire world's ass, not just our own.

      And think about this, it doesn't have to be a global killer. It could simply be a decent sized piece landing in the middle of the atlantic, and kiss good by most of the Eastern US and Western Europe, to a hundred or so miles inland. Think of how many people that would kill. And we're not putting in enough to prevent this thing that we CAN prevent? Why?
      • NASA has got to get funded for this, and the U.S. shouldn't have to pick up the entire tab.

        Last I checked that stood for "National American Space Association," so this would be quite a surprise!

        No offense, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for other countries to help out. Since America's birth in 1776, we have gotten pretty used to the opposite situation (i.e., helping other people out). For example, French Revolution, French & Indian War, Spanish Philipines War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War. But no one helped us out during the Civil War. Basically, it's the price we pay for leading the civilized world.

        :(

        • But no one helped us out during the Civil War.

          you either A. Failed history, or B. Had some funked out revisionist history classes.

          The French were giving money to the south, the English were giving money to the north. Both sides saw a lot of help from outside nations. No one dropped a hugeass army in the middle of our country, and we had better be glad they didn't. A significant invasion by either the French or British at that time could have turned a big chunk of the US back into a colony.

          Kintanon
        • What you are saying isn't entirely true. I believe that various foreign powers were assisting the South (with weapons?) during the Civil War. Without Saudi Arabia's and Egypt's help, our standing in the Middle East would be far different militarily and politically during the Gulf Emergency Presidential Action (our Congress is a bunch of spineless wimps) and our involvement in Afghanistan.

          FWIW, NASA == National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The duplicative "National American" would be redundant. ;-)

          It's not clear to me that we are leading the civilized world, at least not in the sense that others are following us. Instead, I feel as though we are more like (the soccer teams) Manchester United, Bayern Muenchen, or Brazil's national team: we push so hard to win that it's not fun to play against us, and not necessarily fun to play with us, either.

          -Paul Komarek
        • Last I checked that stood for "National American Space Association," so this would be quite a surprise!

          NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Hubble Space Telescope is actually a joint project with the European Space Agency (ESA).

      • Last I checked that stood for "National American Space Association," so this would be quite a surprise

        As many others have already posted, you're right, it would be a surprise, if NASA stood for National American Space Association, but since you got two of the four words wrong and have some pretty sketchy history to go along with it, I think I'll ignore the rest.
    • Well, curiosity it is that has driven all of the advances of Mankind, ... the Crucifiction of Jesus

      Well, I don't know if I would call the crucifixion of Jesus an advance of mankind, nor would I say that it was driven by curiosity. In fact, it was driven by fear and loathing. But at a deeper level, it is the gullibility of humanity that makes us believe it ever happened in the first place.

  • pretty pictures (Score:1, Troll)

    by trb ( 8509 )
    Does the new camera really allow astronomers to take pretty pictures that they couldn't take before, or are they just using pretty pictures as a public relations gimmick? I imagine that it's possible that a camera that was better for scientists wouldn't necessarily make the pictures prettier. "Prettier" could be accomplished with false colorings and other cheap tricks.
    • Technically, it's already "false color". I think the system images frequencies that are out of the normal range of human vision.

      I know the ultraviolet explorer and NICMOS systems use false color imaging, as does LandSat.

    • This particular camera actually does allow for prettier pictures, since its 16 million pixels of resolution looks nice even when printed poster size, and each pixel has great dynamic range and also responds to a nice wide range of wavelengths, allowing good "color" pictures to be taken.
      They put up some other new instruments as well when they upgraded the Hubble, but the ACS, in addition to all the good science stuff it can do, is an excellent pretty-picture camera.

  • Dark matter? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by arkham6 ( 24514 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:53PM (#3437435)
    Any of you astrophysics types out there, can you help me with this? Do you think that the whole concept of dark matter is in a lot more danger now that billions of new galaxy's will come to light? This seriously must tip the size and weight of the universe.

    It also makes all problems here on earth seem so petty and insignificant compared to the grand scheme of things.
    • The "new" galaxies we are seeing don't change our ideas of the density of the universe at all*, since we are seeing more galaxies by looking at a larger volume of space, farther away than what we've seen before.

      There are implications for dark matter theory, however, because a lot of the explanations for the formation of stars and galaxies so soon after the big bang rely on dark matter "seeding" the process.

      *not strictly true, but close enough for the purposes of this pose

    • Re:Dark matter? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anarchofascist ( 4820 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @04:27PM (#3438609) Homepage Journal
      Do you think that the whole concept of dark matter is in a lot more danger now that billions of new galaxy's will come to light?

      It's the density of matter in the universe that requires the existence of dark matter, not how many galaxies there are. Discovering more galaxies doesn't make any difference - we already know the visible-matter density of the universe.

      Far more interesting is going to be using these pictures to work out whether the universe is full of "dark energy" which is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate.

      We can't see dark energy (duuuh cos it's dark) but we can work out whether the universe is accelerating or not. It's all rather complicated, and relies on an accurate survey of the distances and speeds of very distant galaxies.

      Speed is easy, that's measured from spectral red-shift. Distance is hard. Walmart don't make a tape measure 2 billion light years long, so we need a different method.

      Recently, someone worked out a trick to measure the distance. Type 1 supernovae are all about the same brightness, and can be identified by their spectrum. So all we have to do is search for galaxies containing type 1 supernovae. Trouble is, you need to look at a lot of galaxies before you find a single supernova that happens to be going off at the time the photo is taken, and you need to look at a lot of supernovae before you can build up a good statistical picture.

      In short, people have done this from Earth. Now they can do it from space with Hubble, looking at galaxies much further away and look at lots of them at once. Expect the controversy over whether or not the universe's expansion is accelerating to be resolved within the next 2 years.

  • Twilight Zone (Score:2, Funny)

    by jimmcq ( 88033 )
    Quote from the article [washingtonpost.com]: We will be able to enter the 'twilight zone' period when galaxies were just beginning to form out of the blackness following the cooling of the universe from the big bang.

    It sounds like perhaps we are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!
  • The pictures are also available on Yahoo, which I'd bet will be able to handle a slashdotting.

    Here they are. [yahoo.com]
  • The advantage Hubble has over ground based telescopes with much larger lenses is that is does not have to cope with the distorsion caused by the atmosphere.

    I have heard, however, that we now have mathematical models of those atmospheric distorsions that are so accurate that soon ground-based telescopes will regain the "lead". Could somebody with more knowledge confirm/elaborate ?

    DZM
    • My understanding was not mathematical models, per se, but bouncing lasers off of something relatively nearby to measure and correct for the atmospheric distortion. (So-called "adaptive optics".) It's not quite as good as getting beyond the atmosphere entirely, but since the mirrors can be much larger...

      -_Quinn

      • Re:Will Hubble remain competitive ? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Betelgeuse ( 35904 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:34PM (#3437713) Homepage
        Adaptive/Active optics can work in two ways. One way is to use a bright (and it has to be damn bright) star near the target that one's hoping to look at. Then, by seeing how the atmosphere distorts this (supposedly point-source) star, we can adjust the mirror to compensate. There are different ways to do this that involve just moving the image around or re-shaping the mirror altogether, but I won't go into that here. The trouble with this plan is that it's hard to find a star bright enough in the part of the sky that you happen to be observing. It has to be damn bright, since you have to read out the CCD several times a second in order to compensate for the atmosphere fast enough. The second method uses a sodium-type laser that excites a layer in the atmosphere very high up (i.e. above most of the clouds/water vapor/crap). This behaves as a sort of artificial bright star that one can have anywhere in the sky.

        The Center for Adaptive Optics (at UCSC) has a decent simple explanation here [ucolick.org].

        All of this aside, this will probably NOT render HST obsolete any time soon, since this is rediculously hard to do and has yet to really be done convincingly in any large-scale way, as people at my institution [yale.edu] are finding out [noao.edu].
        • All of this aside, this will probably NOT render HST obsolete any time soon, since this is rediculously hard to do and has yet to really be done convincingly in any large-scale way, as people at my institution [yale.edu] are finding out [noao.edu].

          And even beyond the difficulties in getting AO working, there are still swaths of the EM spectrum that get absorbed by the atmosphere which require going to space.

          [TMB]

    • From what I remember, the adaptive optics used by ground based telescopes project a laser onto the atmosphere. The characteristics of the beam are known, so the mirrors in the telescope can be adjusted to produce the correct image. The theory is that by correcting the known image, the atmospheric distortion can be reduced. I don't have all of the maths for this, but that is the gist of how it works.

    • Re:Will Hubble remain competitive ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by GreenPhreak ( 60944 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:15PM (#3437571)
      There is a technology called active optics that can be applied to ground-based observations to 'clean up' the optical distortions (seeing) caused by the atmosphere.

      Most research-grade telescopes these days are Cassegrain telescopes, which means they have two distinct mirrors, the big primary mirror (When you hear sizes of telescopes, they are making reference to the diameter of this mirror: Keck = 10M, UKIRT=4M, etc.), and the smaller secondary mirror which further focuses the beam from the primary into a tight beam suitable for an eyepiece or camera. Basically how active optics works is there are is an extra camera that picks up the wavefronts of the light as it comes through the atmosphere. It then flexes and bends the secondary mirror (much smaller than the primary) in slight ways in order to accomodate for the atmospheric distortions.

      The results are drastic. Images that have been created using active optics are much clearer than non-AO images. However, AO is very expensive to use, and to some extent, degrades the quality of the image. Since some of the light is taken away from the original image as it is sent to the wavefront-detecting camera, it reduces the overall light-gathering power of the telescope. Thus, when a telescope is in AO mode, it creates clearer images, but it isn't as sensitive to deeper/fainter sources as when it isn't in AO mode.

      I don't think that AO will make earth-based telescopes behave like Space-based ones, but it will indeed help earth-based telescopy to create better images.

  • "Wish you were here!"

  • planet finding (Score:4, Informative)

    by GreenPhreak ( 60944 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:02PM (#3437495)
    If all continues to go well, the camera will also spend some time on an improbable quest to take the first picture of a planet outside our solar system.

    I don't think that HST is going to be the first telescope to successfully image an extrasolar planet. It's magnification and capabilities are just barely at the point where it would be able to spot one. I think the first telescope to image an extrasolar planet will be SIM [nasa.gov] (Space Interferometry Mission), which is currently slated to go up some time around 2009. It uses optical interferometry to gain tremendous increase in magnification and precision. It will be ~100,000x more precise than HST with an accuracy of 1-4 Microarcseconds. Of course, it is made to have a very small field of view so it won't make HST or other medium to wide field of view scopes obsolete. But I can't wait to find some of the results that come out of that project.

    • I agree...we have enough trouble trying to get the image of the disc of another star, as opposed to a pinpoint of light. Now take something much smaller and it'll be even harder.

      Still, with the advanced resolution, things are looking prettier!

  • Possibly stupid Question.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Havokmon ( 89874 ) <rick&havokmon,com> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:02PM (#3437500) Homepage Journal
    How does it all work?

    "The Advanced Camera for Surveys has twice the resolution, or sharpness, of the WFPC-2 and five times the sensitivity. It is built around an ultra-sensitive 16-million-pixel detector array that dwarfs the chips found in consumer digital cameras."

    (I like if's.) If galaxies are now able to be seen by us because of such higer resolution, what would happen if we point the Hubble at something closer? Could we see the surface of Pluto? Would we just not be able to focus? Or can we only see things that emit light?

    • Hubble, even with its previous camera, was able to take quite nice pictures of solar system objects. However, they still don't--and even with the new optics, won't--measure up to what we get when we actually send spacecraft there, so the telescope is not used for that very much. The only planet we haven't at least flown by with a spacecraft is Pluto, and even the upgraded Hubble won't be able to show us much (just the very largest features, if there are any) there.
    • ... can we only see things that emit light?

      Pluto doesn't Emit light but it does reflect light.

      The moon doesn't emit light, but we can see it because it reflects the light from the sun. Same with pluto.

      So, to answer your question we could certainly see pluto if we were to point a sufficiently powerful telescope at it. The problem then become the distortion of light over a distance plus any atmosphere it might have(IANAA) would make seeing specific parts of the atmosphere quite difficult to see.

      • The moon doesn't emit light, but we can see it because it reflects the light from the sun. Same with pluto.

        I realize that we see "light". I only mention it because the article mentioned some filters that were not necessarily visible light.. Therefore I wonder what spectrums of light are actually reflected, and if Hubble is "looking" at some spectrum that doesn't get reflected well, if at all. If so, my question of looking at planets (which reflect light) is moot.

        • Ahh, if I understand now then the question is really what does the hubble have that these other great scopes don't? It doesn't have to deal with atmospheric interference. The atmosphere does a (thankfully) wonderful job of filtering out all kinds of light. The hubble, being in space, gets to see all these wavelengths.

    • Re:Possibly stupid Question.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by RobertFisher ( 21116 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:32PM (#3437694) Journal
      An object does not need to emit light in order to be seen by a telescope. Just as you can see terrestrial objects all around you which do not emit any significant amount of light in the visble because they reflect and scatter light from the sun, so too can a telescope see planets from reflected light from the sun.

      The reason why distant planets, asteroids, and comets are so difficult to see is because they must first reflect light from the sun (going as 1 / r1^2, where r1 is the distance from the sun to the object) and then that reflected light must travel from the object to us (going as 1 / r2^2, where r2 is the distance from the object to us). That means the apparent luminosity scales as


      1 / (r1^2 r2^2)


      For objects in the outer solar system, r1 ~ r2, so the scaling goes as the inverse fourth power of the distance, as opposed to the usual inverse square law for directly emitted light. When you throw in the additional fact that many of those outer solar system objects like Pluto and Kuiper belt objects are extremely tiny in comparison to the giant planets, thereby reducing their reflecting power even more, you can see why it is difficult to see such distant objects.

      I am not familiar with any Hubble observations of Pluto, though I am certain you could get an image if you gathered enough light for a long enough duration. Practically speaking, however, Hubble is primarily useful for getting excellent resolution not possible with ground-based telescopes due to atmospheric effects. Furthermore, it is in very high demand, so that it is only used where ground-based instruments cannot work as well. Ground-based telescopes are still much larger, and have a much greater light-gathering ability than Hubble, however, and are still the instruments of choice when every photon counts, as when astronomers gather specta.

      Bob

    • Yes, there is no question that the ACS will be useful to image closer objects. It was the Hubble that recently imaged the first Kuiper-Belt object that has been detected with it's own moon (once again suggesting that Pluto's claim on 'planethood' is less logical than emotional).

      I'd imagine that the ACS is going to make some stunning pics of bodies in our system, but don't expect them terribly soon - time on the ACS is the main restriction, and somehow those deep-field glamour shots get all the attention/resources.

      Maybe they could use it to look for the debris from the Mars Impactors that we sent....
  • The official site to view all of the photos [stsci.edu] is slashdotted, but for once, we didn't do it.
  • "deepest glimpse[s] into the depths of space and time"

    How can the Hubble do that? Unless it was some kind of audio-vibratory-physio-molecular transport device....

    • When you look at things 5 or 10 billion light years away, you see them as they were 5 or 10 billion years ago. So, the depths of time. The deep field images confirm what the Big Bang theory predicts: the universe was quite different 10 billion years ago. It had lots of little hydrogen rich galaxies packed close together, instead of the fewer, larger, and more spread out galaxies we see around here now.
  • There is a TIFF version which I didn't opt to download (too big), but here is one of the full size images [mac.com] in jpg format. It's 3690x3743. I grabbed this one from the official web site earlier today. I, like others no doubt, can't get there now, so I figured others might like a way to get at at least one full rez picture....

  • hires pic links on space.com (Score:3, Informative)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:14PM (#3437566)
    Up to 1280X1024! at http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/downloads/wall papers/newhubble.php [space.com]

    This will get us by until the Hubble Heritage Site [stsci.edu] gets ahold of them or the main site becomes un-/.ed.

  • animations... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Ramsés Morales ( 13327 )
    Check this animations:

    http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2002/11/anim at ion.html

    Right now I'm watching my new desktop image of the tadpole galaxy. And like another poster said, it is amazing and scary to watch all those other galaxies in the background of that image.
  • It's in my pants!!!

    Seriously, the examination of the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe is staggering. Humanity may never have the opportunity to leave our own galaxy because of it... but what if that energy was something that could be tapped?

    Heady thoughts for a little mind...

  • NASA's work (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Medevo ( 526922 )
    Its nice to see that every once and a while the millions and millions of dollars that the american government pours into the space project does provide us with great results

    With the new advent of space-tourests speding $20 mil to get into space (with russia), the idea of science and research in space is getting put in the back seat. An example of this is when both of the tourists went into space i saw them on the news, but as of yet today i have not heard a peep about this (on the headlines).

    Hopefully as more and more people look at space to answers more and more questions , it wont remain a area that is of lesser inportance to popular opinion

    Medevo

  • More Hubble stories (Score:3, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @02:33PM (#3437700) Homepage

    This NASA story, Hubble's New Camera Delivers Breathtaking Views Of The Universe [nasa.gov], has links to the photos. One of the linked sites, Hubblesite.org [hubblesite.org] has stories such as Hubble's Advanced Camera Unveils a Panoramic New View of the Universe [hubblesite.org], which has thumbnail photos.

  • Could someone please explain the extent to which space imagery in general (and particularly today's stunning hubble images) is altered by artists? I'm of the understanding that the original image was not actually of visible light, due to the doppler shift, and therefore the color image is "constructed" from an uglier image.

    Is there some science to "unshifting" the colors such that the colors in the picture are "correct", or are they just picked on a whim by an artist?

    Also the sharply pointed glare/lensfx spikes around the bright stars look like they are faked-in as well to me... Were they artistically added, were they artifacts of the original camera, or does it "really" look that way?

    I'd appreciate these stories (i.e. Washington Post article) more if they would be mroe direct with the public about how much is "real" and how much is pure art. I'm sure 99% of their viewers (sheep) believe these are direct camera snapshots of the universe and nobody is telling them any different.

    • Re:Could someone please explain? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nagora ( 177841 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @03:34PM (#3438209)
      I have not been able to read the site as it's down but looking at the images I'd guess that not much has been done other than to "unshift" where needed because of doppler. It's also fairly common for colour balance to be fiddled to bring out detail in images where there is low contrast and filtered to take out noise but I've never heard of a Hubble image being touched up by a live human artist. Publicity shots like these also tend to be chosen for their "real colouredness" as NASA feels people are turned off by being told that this is a view in the X-Ray spectrum.

      So the answer to the question "how realistic is this?" is that if you had really good eyesight and were very close to these objects you would recognise them from these photos although they might sometimes seem less vibrant.

      Also the sharply pointed glare/lensfx spikes around the bright stars look like they are faked-in as well to me... Were they artistically added, were they artifacts of the original camera, or does it "really" look that way?

      The spikes are a common artifact of the cameras; a human eye would only see these if you had been crying or suffered from some form of eye trouble (poss astigmatism but I'm not sure). They are no more real than the lens-flare that's added to poorly designed computer games that attempt to make it seem like you're there by adding something you'd only see if you weren't there and were actually viewing the action via a camera. Irony, eh?

      TWW

      • I have not been able to read the site as it's down but looking at the images I'd guess that not much has been done other than to "unshift" where needed because of doppler.

        No, there has been no "unshifting". Of the background galaxies that are red, some are red because they have intrinsically red colours, and some are red because they are red-shifted due to the expansion of the universe. In fact, there's a gorgeous group just to the left of the Tadpole that (at least using photo-z-by-eye) are all at the same redshift.

        [TMB]

    • In real life the structures seen in Hubble photographs are not nearly as colourful as the images lead you to belive. These sorts of images are the net result of various image collecting methods and some digital retouching and fancifying.

      To form digital images modern telescopes stick a CCD imager in the place where typical diagrams of telescopes show an eyepiece to be. The CCDs used in astrometric imaging are a vast cut above the pieces of crap in digital cameras. The CCD arrays in many telescopes are hundreds or even thousands of pixels on a side and are cooled by various means in order to cut down on static caused from temperature variations and changes in the electronics. They also differ from consumer models because they do not have a colour mask on them, they only produce greyscale images.

      So to take a picture an astronomer points the telescope at a cosmic object, opens the apeture and turns the CCD imager on. To grab colour information in order to perform spectroscopy filters are placed over the CCD imager during exposure. A series of exposures is taken depending on the dimness of the star and the particular part of the spectrum being imaged. Red and infrared light takes the longest to image while blue and ultraviolet take the shortest amount of time (due to the higher energy of the photons). Depending on the equipment available different numbers of exposures are taken. For multi-spectrum images up to 6 exposures are taken IIRC: infrared, red, yellow-orange, green, blue, and ultraviolet. These are each stored as greyscale bitmaps and represent the intensity values for a particular spectrum. For meaningful scientific research these colour spectra are rarely if ever combined, if you're studying characteristics of O and B stars in a nebula you're going to run some analisys algorithms on maybe the blue and ultraviolet images; if you're studying the nebula itself you're going to pay more attention to the IR image because it is going to help you find dust clouds emitting IR radiation. Images ad populus are processed to RGB colour space with the normally imvisible IR and UV bands applied to the red and blue portions of the images respectively to enhance detail. The end result of this process are the images printed in books and magazines and downloaded from space.com.

      In reality the objects being imaged are pretty dull looking. Due to the sheer amount of radiative surface area of these objects they don't produce very intense bands of colour. If you were to look through an ultra powerful telescope at the Orion nebula it would look pretty grey and boring to the eye, it would look that way even up close. Remember we're scores of trillions of miles from these objects, to our eyes they are a few arc minutes or seconds across. A single CCD pixel is picking up light front millions of billions miles of radiative surface area. Not only that but the images are processed in such a manner that the compression from 6 channels worth of 8 bit colour values into 3 channels of 8 bit colour values to make colours especially brilliant. Each band is processed with low pass filters and contrast enhancement algorithms to form finer images with less noise. The blooms you mention are artifacts from the spiders holding the secondary reflector in telescopes. In production images these are often enhanced to give a more dramatic look to the image. For research purposes these are almost always filtered out with processing algorithms. Public images from places like space.com are mostly publicity fluff, if you want the really badass images download the ginormous TIFF images from various observatory's websites. These are the closest thing you get to a raw image without manning the telescope yourself.

  • WashingtonPost Gallery (Score:3, Informative)

    by aengblom ( 123492 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @03:28PM (#3438165) Homepage
    Nice advert free gallery of the photos available from WashingtonPost.com. Nice and big too.

    Click for Gallery [washingtonpost.com]

  • It may not be as big as it looks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @04:07PM (#3438462) Homepage
    I attended a talk at CalTech this weekend by Janna Levin (author of How the Universe got its Spots [princeton.edu]). Her theory is that the universe may "wrap around at the edges", a sort of 3-dimensional analogue to the old Asteroids paradigm... i.e. if you travel in a straight line long enough, you would arrive back at the point where you started. If this is in fact the case, then it's likely that many of those "thousands and thousands of galaxies" that the Hubble is seeing are, in fact, merely additional images of other galaxies, produced by light waves that are on their second (or third or fourth) trip "around" the universe. It's hard to detect the redundancy, however, since these additional images would show the galaxies at a much younger age, and thus they wouldn't look the same as the galaxies do "now" (errm... in their most direct image).


    As the Matrix lady says, that oughtta really bake your noodle. :^)

    • On the other hand, if inflation (that is, the universe expanding faster than the speed of light) has had as a significant effect on the size of the Universe as some would have us believe, the visible Universe is likely to just be a small bubble in a much larger physical Universe, since the light in it simply hasn't had time to travel all the way across it.

      As for the Universe wrapping around, well, yeah; what else is it going to do? Ok, maybe it'll just reverse you when you cross the "boundary", and you end up going in the other direction with your left/right reversed (like what would happen if you were to flip through the 5th dimension) or something. Bah, how should I know ;)

  • Scheduler for Hubble (Score:2, Informative)

    by metalogic ( 445469 )
    Do you know in what language the planning and scheduling software for the Hubble telescope is written?

    Common Lisp!

    You can find some of the details in this paper: COSI: Adding Constraints to the Object-Oriented Paradigm [stsci.edu].

    Cool stuff!!

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