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Space Science

New Infrared Camera Gets Amazing Orion Images 52

Posted by timothy from the spaceporn dept.
The BBC is reporting, as is the Register, about the new Wide-Field Camera (WFCAM) on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. WFCAM is the world's most powerful astronomical infrared camera. It's 5.4 meters long and weighs 1500 kilograms. As part of its commissioning, it produced some stunning images of interstellar clouds in Orion.
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New Infrared Camera Gets Amazing Orion Images More

New Infrared Camera Gets Amazing Orion Images

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  • amazing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by blackomegax ( 807080 )
    I love the composite shot, showing the zoom steppings, putting it all into perspective... The max zoom quality is jaw dropping.

  • color codes (Score:5, Informative)

    by global_diffusion ( 540737 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @09:44AM (#11180766) Homepage
    Hey, check out these pics. The nice thing is that they labeled them with what the colors actually mean (instead of having people think that interstellar gas is normally green and purple, like in star trek).

  • Of all the photos , the one I liked (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @09:46AM (#11180769) Homepage Journal
    It's an infra red telescope and all that... it can see a lot of stuff in space BUT the photo I really loved was this Down to Earth Night shot [nyud.net] of the telescope itself....

  • Sherpa scientists? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The altitude of this thing is 13760 feet above sea level. Normal folk need extra oxygen at that altitude. Are the living quarters pressurised? Is it operated by remote control?
    • Ehh, no, normal folk don't. Many, many people each year climb Mount Rainier (in Washington state), which is 14,410 feet high, and my uncle's said none of his clients have ever needed supplemental air. He's a professional mountain guide with over 300 climbs of Rainier alone. Everest Base Camp, where climbers go to acclimatize, is at about 17,060 feet, and needing oxygen there is exceptionally rare; if you need it there, there's no way you're going to make it higher up on the mountain. So, at 13,760 feet, the

      • Re:Sherpa scientists? (Score:3, Informative)

        by dpp ( 585742 )

        You're quite right that we don't use supplemental oxygen when up at the telescopes.

        However, one difference that I would point out is that usually people climbing mountains such as Mount Rainier (I presume) and certainly Everest will take quite some time to trek up to these kinds of altitudes. With Mauna Kea, you can in principle get from the sea-level town of Hilo to the nearly 14,000-foot summit in a couple of hours if you don't stop to acclimatize. This is, however, an extremely bad idea! People spend ac

    • Re:Sherpa scientists? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shag ( 3737 ) * on Saturday December 25, 2004 @11:50AM (#11181110) Journal
      13760? Bah, that's comfy. Slightly uphill from UKIRT is the University of Hawaii's 88-inch scope, which is sited at roughly 13770 feet with its dome floor around 13790+. There are others on Mauna Kea with higher dome floors (bigger facilities, more modern) but 88 is the highest-sited scope in the world that's regularly manned every week of the year (and often every day), by day crew for maintenance and/or night operators.

      Yes, I work there [hawaii.edu]. No, I don't use oxygen. Below about 15000 feet the TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) is "indefinite" which means some people can go hang out for 12-14 hours with nothing bad happening. There are some observatories up there that are talking about creating a single pressurized "break room" for staff - not where I work, though. :)

      Oh, and the Rockwell HAWAII-2RG 2048x2048 sensors used to build UKIRT's WFCAM (it has 4 of them in a square array) were co-developed by U. of Hawaii, Rockwell Scientific and UMC, and first deployed in November of 2003 in the "ULB" camera on 88. For some time, 88 with ULB was the most powerful infrared setup for astrophotography; since UKIRT is the largest dedicated infrared scope in the world, it will now (with its own 16-megapixel camera) really take some great pictures. :) I was over at UKIRT for their 25th anniversary open house, and it's one BIG instrument.

      ...of course, Gemini South (8.1-meter) has ordered some HAWAII-2RG chips from Rockwell, I think... and the European folks are mumbling about doing a 4x4 array of them (64 megapixels) for their forthcoming VISTA telescope in Chile, which will be the bigger better successor to UKIRT.

      • Re:Sherpa scientists? (Score:2, Informative)

        by phirst ( 683939 )
        Actually, a couple of corrections: WFCAM uses HAWAII-II arrays, not HAWAII-IIRGs, and VISTA is using arrays from Rayethon, they're not Rockwell Hawaii arrays at all.
        • Oops, you're quite right about VISTA -- I should've remembered that, just read it yesterday.

          I didn't know about the distinction between HAWAII-II and HAWAII-IIRG - what's the difference?

          Thanks!

  • Orion image (Score:2, Informative)

    by MerlTurkin ( 598333 )
    Man that's a GREAT image! Congrats to the imaging team!
  • The little speck in the lower-left hand corner?

    We assume that it is a giant killer crab robot that the ancient orionids left in orbit [caltech.edu] to defend their treasure trove of super science.

    Of course, without the Improved Space Scanner we can't be sure.

  • Dusty Galaxy? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by erichill ( 583191 )
    Check out the object on the right edge toward the bottom of the xlarge picture. It looks remarkably like a spiral galaxy seen edge on. If I understand this image correctly that galaxy wouldn't be visible in the visible through that cloud. If so, it must be terrifically bright in the IR.
    • You've got good eyes spotting it.

      It probably is a galaxy, though not necessarily terrifically bright as you call it. It's located in the part where the intervening gas of the Orion nebula (and the Galaxy) is thinner and it doesn't take much brightness for us to see through the cloud. You'd be right that it's a dusty galaxy (though it is not so uncommon).

      Cheers,

      -h

  • Slashdotted: I'll describe the image to everyone (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's a tad blurry but it seems to be:

    Error: 500
    Too man connections

  • But what about the galaxy? (Score:3, Funny)

    by cloudscout ( 104011 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @11:01AM (#11180936) Homepage
    Were they able to get nice, clear shots of Orion's belt?
  • Wireframe please.

  • Time to Die. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rocketsled ( 676050 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @12:10PM (#11181194) Homepage
    "I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen C-beams glitter in the darkness at the Tannhauser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."
  • Well, I for one, Welcome our new Master of Orion
  • Not completely offtopic, but how prevalent is the JPEG2 format these days? I've been using it on OS X for some time now, I thought it was a standard, and I just checked and converting the "orion-centre-xlarge.png" to a lossless JP2 file caused it to go from 3.5MB to 1.1MB. Is there still spotty support of this format on Windows/*nix?

    • Re:PNG vs. JPEG2 (Score:2, Informative)

      by dpp ( 585742 )
      I work for the Joint Astronomy Centre [hawaii.edu] and did some of the work in putting those images together. If I remember correctly, I made the JPEGs from the PNGs with ImageMagick's "convert" tool. ImageMagick does seem to support JP2, but I don't know how much it is in general use (I haven't tried it myself) so I usually go for normal JPEGs in order to make sure as many people as possible can view the images.
      • Well, it would have been a simple matter to (in addition to the png and jpg download formats) add a third of JP2 and see what kind of response you got. Whoever used that version would have saved the server some bandwidth...

        I informally note that (from a lossless compression standpoint) JP2 is outstanding for photographs but PNG will occasionally beat JP2 in images with large swaths of a solid color (a frame of animation, for example).
  • Not trying to take away anything from UKIRT (which is an awesome telescope from user's perspective), what do they mean by "most powerful" here? To me it means highest sensitivity to IR light or highest spatial resolution achievable with the combination of detector (which is the theme of this release) and its optical system (UKIRT). Apparently this instrument provides the largest field of view, which is cool indeed, but would that deserves "most powerful" title? It's a bit self-serving statement to me.

    Again

    • Actually, there's a fairly solid definition of 'how powerful' a survey camera is. They point is that we're using WFCAM to survey large areas of sky - they "power" of a survey camera in this sense is basically how long it takes to image a certain area of sky down to a certain sensitivity.

      WFCAM is so good because it provides both the huge field of view and also pritty good sensitivity. Certainly, a camera on a bigger telescope could be morse sensitive, but if its field of view is so much smaller that it en

      • I agree with your comment, Phirst. It's probably the most powerful SURVEY camera that I have seen.
        But I use grating/echelle spectrographs mostly, both on ground and space. So from *my* heavily biased perspective, the title of "most powerful" doesn't sound right.

        I know it's just a matter of phrasing things. Like I said, this is a nifty instrument. I've always thought that detectors & instruments should define the quality and goodness of a telescope. You know, having an 8-m telescope with no working inst
        • Perhaps they mean "Powerful" in terms of magnification? It would seem normal to me to refer to a powerful telescope if it can magnify an image that much considering how powerful the magnification of the human eye is when compared to binoculars.
  • Or are they simply multimillion dollar pretty pictures?

  • Some techy trivial (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phirst ( 683939 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @05:01PM (#11182087) Homepage

    Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM.

    We did actually submit the story to slashdot, thinging they might want to scoop the BBC and The Register for a change. Got rejected, but anyway. I thought Slashdot types might be interested in some of the techy background to the instrument:

    WFCAM generates about 200GB of data per night. The data is handled (recorded then processed) by a cluster of 8 PCs (Ahem, why yes, they do run Linux), each of which has a ~650GB RAID array.

    An interesting point to note is that in total, the WFCAM system contains a total of about 60 hard disks. No commercial hard disk is rated for use above 10,000 feet, and UKIRT is at almost 14,000. Hard disks rely on atmospheric air pressure to keep the heads seperated from the disk surface, so we've even found keeping the RAIDs running had at times presented quite a challenge.

    Also, of course the PCs are fan cooled. Fan cooling doesn't work too well when there's only 60% of the air they're used to (atmospheric pressure on the summit of Mauna Kea is about 60% that at sea level), and with the combination of 2.8GHz Xeons and half a dozen disks in each 3U rackmount machine, we had to fairly seriosuly beef up the case fans to keep the machines at a sane temperature.

    • A quick question; Is the entire WFCAM team posting in this thread? I'm just wondering if you guys do nothing but read slashdot while you're waiting for the next pic to come through...
  • Has anyone seen the Guardian yet?
  • Is it just me or does one of the cloud formations look remarkably like a face?

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