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Space

Hubble Takes Amazing New Images of Andromeda, Pillars of Creation 97

Posted by Soulskill from the my-god-it's-full-of-stars dept.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in April, 1990. In 1995, it presented us with one of its most iconic images: a close-up of gas pillars in the Eagle Nebula, dubbed the "Pillars of Creation." Now, as HST approaches its 25th anniversary, astronomers have re-shot the pillars at a much higher resolution. Here are direct images links: visible light, comparison with old image, near-infrared light. "The infrared view transforms the pillars into eerie, wispy silhouettes seen against a background of myriad stars. That's because the infrared light penetrates much of the gas and dust, except for the densest regions of the pillars. Newborn stars can be seen hidden away inside the pillars."

That's not the only new image from Hubble today: NASA has also released the most high definition view of the Andromeda Galaxy that we've ever seen. Here's a web-friendly image, but that doesn't really do it justice. The full image is 69,536 px by 22,230 px. To see Andromeda in all its glory, visit the ESA's dedicated, zoomable site that contains all the image data. At the highest zoom levels, you can make out a mind-blowing number of individual stars. Andromeda is over 2 million light-years distant.
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Hubble Takes Amazing New Images of Andromeda, Pillars of Creation More

Hubble Takes Amazing New Images of Andromeda, Pillars of Creation

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  • Meh (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hasn't changed much - not a single new star in all this time.

  • Cool 3D effect... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mpthompson ( 457482 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @07:55PM (#48741953)

    On the pillars comparison image, if you cross your eyes to superimpose the old image over the new image you'll see a pretty cool 3D effect. Not sure if it's something in my imagination or if the stellar motion over 20 years gives us two slightly different view of the pillars to create a kind of stereo image.

    • I'm just wondering how much of that new Pillars image has been photoshopped. The lens flares, the sharp(ened?) contours, the contrast, it seems like an awful lot of processing was done on this image, it looks kind of posterized, and I wonder what the original looked like before they decided to make it look "better". Or is this really the raw image that came out of the telescope?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gerddie ( 173963 )
        Lens flares? You probably mean the lines that are a result of Fraunhofer diffraction [stfmc.de]. As for the post-processing, You might want to have a look at the fast facts [hubblesite.org] (not much detail though).

      • It looked like electrons vibrating an a CCD. Which is not verry interesting, so they used that data to produce colors on a screen.

        I'm always baffled by people who think they know what an acceptable level of processing is. Yes, there are ethical concerns when someone is trying to deliberately be deceptive, but all images are heavilly processed from their original form. That's true whether it's digital or film, or whatever comes next.

  • http://www.spacetelescope.org/... [spacetelescope.org]
    Are those stars or just noise? It's really hard to tell.

    • Re:Stars or noise (Score:4, Informative)

      by mpthompson ( 457482 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @08:19PM (#48742085)

      Stars... If you pan around the outskirts of the image you will see that the density drops off defining the shape of the galaxy.

      • Stars... If you pan around the outskirts of the image you will see that the density drops off defining the shape of the galaxy.

        Noise could also be proportional to the unresolved intensity. However, you can see that the dots are actually round, and thus resolved stars, and not simple individual pixel noise.

        • Re:Stars or noise (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Whiternoise ( 1408981 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @07:52AM (#48744419)
          That's the amazing thing about this image - from a low zoom level it looks like CCD shot noise. Then you realise that the zoom slider is fully out and you can go in.. and in.. and in.. until you see that the noise isn't noise, it's actually all stars. You can verify this by panning to the edge of the frame where the galaxy is far less dense and you can see stars with the (low noise) darkness of the universe behind them.

    • Re:Stars or noise (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vix86 ( 592763 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @09:39PM (#48742611)
      The sheer number of stars in the Andromeda photo is humbling. While panning through it, the thought struck me that perhaps around one of those stars exists a planet with intelligent life that might also be looking at a high res image of the Milky Way and be thinking the same thing about them.

      • I zoomed all the way in to the very far right of the image and with an incredibly crude estimation, determined there were about 10,000 stars displayed on my monitor. At the darkest part of the image. Whats weird is how close together they look. How come everything looks so far away from us?

        • I zoomed all the way in to the very far right of the image and with an incredibly crude estimation, determined there were about 10,000 stars displayed on my monitor. At the darkest part of the image. Whats weird is how close together they look. How come everything looks so far away from us?

          The billions of tiny stars are actually nowhere near as large as they look in the picture. They are points of light that have been smudged out into little blobs by the image capturing process. The brighter the star the bigger the blob - that's why the nearer, brighter stars look much bigger, when in fact they are also virtually point sources at this scale.

          • Yeah I understand the scale involved. I was just complaining. You can ignore my post and chalk it up to NSFPP (non-space-faring people problems)

      • Only they wouldn't be able to see any intelligent life here, since we didn't exist yet two million years ago. By the time they can actually see us, we may have gone extinct.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dpilot ( 134227 )

          But the Earth had an oxygen (potentially biosculpted) atmosphere some 500 million years ago. So if someone there has been able to observe Earth and know something about its atmosphere, they'd know that there might be life here. We would count as "interesting".

          I've read more recently that there may be other ways to have significant amounts of free oxygen in a planetary atmosphere besides biological processes. I have no idea how probable those ways are compared to life, how stable they are, how "interestin

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • "Are those stars or just noise?"

      It's really full of stars, Bowman.

  • HST's M31 vs R.Gendler's M31 (Score:3)

    by Arkh89 ( 2870391 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @08:04PM (#48742011)

    This image is so cool : http://hubblesite.org/newscent... [hubblesite.org]
    Robert Gendler's gallery is visible here [robgendlerastropics.com]

  • When I activate the flash item, I get the following error from Zoomify:

    Error loading: Image path not in HTML or XML

  • Extending the life of Hubble... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mpthompson ( 457482 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @08:06PM (#48742021)

    These images demonstrate that the Hubble is a national (if not international) treasure. With two U.S. rockets soon capable of delivering astronauts to LEO, there must be some way to perform some type of minimal maintenance mission to the Hubble so it can continue its mission beyond the current EOL deadline. With no suitable visible light replacement telescope on the horizon, dumping the telescope into the ocean will be a crime. This would be a marvelous opportunity for someone like Elon Musk or the executives at Boeing to step up and lobby the government to be allowed to put together such a mission.

    • old tech...well, my '87 Camry still starts, but it's orbital velocity has degraded enough to turn a beer run into "..and then what happened..." adventure.

    • Re:Extending the life of Hubble... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater.gmail@com> on Monday January 05, 2015 @08:33PM (#48742199) Homepage

      With two U.S. rockets soon capable of delivering astronauts to LEO, there must be some way to perform some type of minimal maintenance mission to the Hubble so it can continue its mission beyond the current EOL deadline.

      There isn't. The manned vehicles on the horizon are simply are not capable of doing so. Everyone wanted "cheap and safe" capsules, and losing practically all but the most basic manned capability in space is the price of that.

      • Last century's motto: To Boldly Go

        This century's motto: Always the Low Price. Always.

        • This centuries motto wouldn't be a problem if idiots didn't expect us to Boldly Go - at Bargain Basement prices. And without losing any vehicles. And especially without loosing any lives.

          • This centuries motto wouldn't be a problem if idiots didn't expect us to Boldly Go - at Bargain Basement prices. And without losing any vehicles. And especially without loosing any lives.

            We don't Boldly Go anymore. We stand in line with our shoes off.

    • One of the last things the shuttles did was a refit repair upgrade to Hubble. The Hubble is good for another decade. Well barring aliens blowing it up for peeking into their windows, or an unlucky solar flare

  • I can't tell for sure what I'm looking at on that zoomable site. Is each pixel of light a star or is that noise in the picture?

  • I can imagine... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mpthompson ( 457482 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @08:41PM (#48742261)

    ...somewhere 2 million lightyears away in the Andromeda galaxy a nerd zooming into a similar high resolution image of the Milky Way galaxy, seeing a faint yellow smudge no larger than a pixel and wondering if it's a star or noise in the image.

  • how many megapixels is that? (Score:4, Funny)

    by dudpixel ( 1429789 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @09:16PM (#48742473)

    The full image is 69,536 px by 22,230 px

    Who said the megapixel war was over?

  • Leading Edge? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CaptainLard ( 1902452 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @10:14PM (#48742765)

    Looks like the pillars have a leading edge with debris trailing off. What set something that massive, with that shape, in motion? And where is it going?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dpilot ( 134227 )

      First question... Is such a dust cloud inconsistent with a sun-like star somewhere inside the boundaries?
      Second question... If a sun-like star can exist there, is such a dust cloud inconsistent with that star having a planetary system like ours?
      Third question... Assuming the first two questions pass, and that there could be an Earth-like planet there with life that could look up into the sky and wonder, what would they see?

      In other words, is that dust really still a hard vacuum, just seen from a differen

      • Places with a lot of activity like this one migh5 have a lot of stars capable of supporting life. Unfortunatley they also have a lot of debris, that'll probably wipe out any life before it gets very advanced. Places to look for life are usually much less active.

  • ...space is full of those freaking bastards.

  • Looks like 3 bearded, cloaked figures at the "tips" of the columns in the infrared image.

    I'm probably just weird.

  • Did any of the people involved in the name read the Sword of Truth series?

  • The Price of Art (Score:3)

    by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @08:39AM (#48744651)

    Average out the cost of designing, building and orbiting a newer, better Hubble across all the people in the world who have a few extra bucks and an appreciation of that iconic photo as art...worthwhile for no other reason than for us to stare at it and be profoundly moved.

    I wonder how much it would cost each person to "git 'er done".

  • Or is it too far from the Milky Way?

  • Pillars of Creation is getting set for a cropping, and the M31 mosaic is just too damn big for anything but zipping around with Preview.

  • The cluster of very blue-white pixels and wire diffraction are clearly stars. If I zoom into a fairly dark region, I see lots of red and yellow pixels as well. Are those sensor noise?

  • Why do all the cloud forms follow such a similar drift pattern? Is it the movement of the stars themselves within their local group? Is there something beyond the image forcing the wind direction (other massive stars and/or a supernova are mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the Pillars). Is there a count of how many stars are being formed here? The IR image suggests quite a few.

    Stunning imagery. Keep 'em coming, Team Hubble!!!

  • Are the colours in pillars of creation visible and IR pictures "natural" or were they added in later? I don't know much about astronomy, but I thought that original images don't have much color and the bright colors are added in to make them prettier/easier to study. Am I wrong?

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