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Space Science

Hubble's Infrared Camera Repaired 18

Posted by michael from the windows-on-the-world dept.
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."
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Hubble's Infrared Camera Repaired More

Hubble's Infrared Camera Repaired

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  • It's amazing how static those pictures look. We take one today, we take one next year, they look identical. But if you consider that the objects that are photographed are actually moving at enormous speeds and violent eruptions are likely taking place on each little dot that we see, the awesomeness of the Universe is truly revealed.

    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!
    • How lucky we are to live in such times!

      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!
      • The luck refers to our own personal luck of being born in the last century.

        Love the experiment, BTW.
      • Their hard work, your good luck (to get born now instead of in 1600 or 120,000 BC).
        • Am I really lucky though? I mean, I work so hard and somebody that I don't know is going to think I lost the lottery because I didn't get to see all the cool stuff that they can see.

          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.
    • We take one today, we take one next year, they look identical.

      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).
  • Now, that is an amazing piece of technology. If the equipment weren't so sensative and the focal length was in miles instead of parsecs :-) then imagine if you turned it around.......

    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)

      by Fantanicity ( 583135 )
      NASA false-color these images

      Since it's an infra-red camera, yes.

    • Re: False Color (Score:2, Informative)

      by Ethidium ( 105493 )
      As stated in the article, red represents longer infrared wavelengths, and blue represents shorter ones. This corresponds exactly to what we would see if our eyes picked up the IR part of the spectrum, rather than the visible bit.

      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.

    • You might have men in black at your door soon. If you remember the "nearsightedness" of the big hubble mistake and the fact that as sponsors of the hubble, the US airforce got exclusive rights to it for the first year and that the nearsightedness wasn't fixed till the AirForce lease was up one can draw interesting conclusions as to what the air force was looking at. And whether the "mistake" was intentional.

      Just got to love those conspiracy theories.

  • Not our Galactic Center (Score:3, Informative)

    by spaceling ( 521125 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @12:44AM (#3650474) Homepage
    This slashdot post had me assuming that the galactic center being referred to was our own Milky Way's. It is not. The findings are not of our galactic center, but that of NGC 4013. "NGC 4013, which looks similar to our Milky Way Galaxy, resides in the constellation Ursa Major, 55 million light-years from Earth."
  • The red color of the bottom "hydrogen light" image looks like visible H-alpha emission at 656 nm, but it's the infrared Paschen-alpha line emitted at 1876 nm when an electron drops from level 4 to 3. Here's an easy explanation [colorado.edu] of the hydrogen spectrum.
  • It was upgraded. It was originally cooled using expendable solid nitrogen. Although the nitrogen did run out faster than planned, its limited lifetime was intentional. The new closed-cycle neon cooler is actually a major functional upgrade over the original design.
  • Does this mean the Hubble can now take pictures of people that see through their clothes?

    Honestly, you would think those NASA guys would have better things to do with their time...
  • I have always favoured an unmanned telescope over the more expensive, manned projects. In terms of manufacturing, manned space projects always post a loss, financially. And any tech derived from them could have more easily been designed from the start in Earth-bound research laboratories. The best hope that the Hubble gives us is that if there is life out there, it is most likely to be found at the galactic center, amidst the high concentration of stars. Only a powerfull orbital scope will ever detect any extra-solar civilizations. That's where all the funding should go.

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