

Hubble's Infrared Camera Repaired 18
blamanj writes "Hubble's newly repaired Infrared Camera, has produced some interesting new pics, including a "golden band" at the galactic center that is 'churning out stars at a torrid pace.' NASA press release and images here."
Nice pics (Score:1)
What's truly amazing to me is that those of us who live now are able to see these structures of beauty in such vivid detail. A thousand years ago people looked at the stars and saw only points of light and deduce them to be stars or planets. How lucky we are to live in such times!
Re:Nice pics (Score:2)
I agree that it's cool to be able to see more than anyone else, but it's not luck. It was a shitload of hard work, and the accumulated knowlege of all those people in history who never got to see these amazing things.
Luck implies random chance. I think it's not fair to call more hard work that either you or me can shake a stick at luck.
Oh, and by the way, I'm terminating my little experiment early. See my web page for details. To summarize, I was going to post 20 completely bogus posts with the goal of getting people to mod them up instead of down. It worked at first, but then the more clueful moderators came along after 2-3 days and modded the posts down. I wanted to see if I could stay above 45 karma, but was modded down to 42 after 8 posts. The conclusion is that Slashdot's moderation system does work, but not efficiently. It takes some time for the more considered moderations to kick in. After about 3 days a large part of the bogus information will be either responded to or modded down. But still, don't believe everything you read on the Internet!
Re:Nice pics (Score:1)
Love the experiment, BTW.
Work vs. luck (Score:2)
Re:Work vs. luck (Score:2)
So, am I lucky to be born now, or really unlucky that I'll never kiss a green chick like Captain Kirk?
This makes luck seem a little less lucky to me.
Re:Work vs. luck (Score:1)
Lots of green chicks there.
Re:Nice pics (Score:1)
Actually, for objects within our galaxy, many of them change visibly on time scales ranging from days to years (and not just brightness). The best example, from the Hubble Telescope, is the Crab Nebula Movie [stsci.edu] they did a few years ago. Note that the age of the Crab Nebula was originally determined by comparing photographs taken about 10 years apart, measuring the expansion of the nebula, and extrapolating backward to get an approximate year. Then, a check of historical records shows that there was a supernova in that area of the sky in 1054. Another object which has been known for a long time to show changes visible in a normal telescope is Hubble's Variable Nebula [stsci.edu] (OK, no cool animation).
Hubble..... (Score:1)
We could identify shreded Enron documents in landfills.....
But anyways, glad to see its working better now.
Anyone know if they have ever done SETI work with the scope? I would be curious to know if they have. Also, does NASA false-color these images?
Re:Hubble..... (Score:3, Informative)
Since it's an infra-red camera, yes.
Re: False Color (Score:2, Informative)
Nearly all of the cool astrophotographs that you'll see from Hubble and elsewhere are false-colored, because the visible spectrum is not any more useful than any of the other spectra (microwave, UV, and IR, to name a few), provided you have the proper equipment to capture all of them.
You can see more cool hubble pics (and other astrophotographs), and learn more about false-coloring of astrophotographs at the Astronomy Picture of the Day [nasa.gov] page.
Re:Hubble..... (Score:1)
Just got to love those conspiracy theories.
Not our Galactic Center (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not our Galactic Center (Score:3, Informative)
Hydrogen Light (Score:2)
It wasn't broken, it wasn't fixed (Score:2)
Is this like those Sonys? (Score:1)
Honestly, you would think those NASA guys would have better things to do with their time...
This great Telescope (Score:1)