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Space

Hubble Turns 25 45

Posted by Soulskill from the thanks-for-all-the-desktop-wallpapers dept.
Taco Cowboy points out that the Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 today. Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Currently, it is flying about 340 miles over the Earth and circling us every 97 minutes. While the telescope itself is not really much to look at, that silver bucket is pure gold for astronomers. Scientists have used that vantage point to make ground-breaking observations about planets, stars, galaxies and to reveal parts of our universe we didn't know existed. The telescope has made more than a million observations and astronomers have used Hubble data in more than 12,700 scientific papers, "making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built," according to NASA. ... NASA aims to keep Hubble operating through at least 2020 so that it can overlap with its successor. The James Webb Space Telescope is due to launch in October 2018 and begin observations in mid-2019. NASA celebrated by releasing a new, epic image from Hubble titled "Celestial Fireworks." It is accompanied by an impressive flythrough video. Some nice galleries of Hubble images have been put together at the NY Times and Slate, but a bigger collection is available directly from the official Hubble website.
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Hubble Turns 25 More

Hubble Turns 25

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  • Thanks, Hubble (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dreamchaser ( 49529 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @08:00AM (#49544391) Homepage Journal

    Both my scientific curiosity and my desktop backgrounds thank you.

  • Hubble is not dead? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hubble was born on the same day as the telescope named after him?

  • The Best Investment (Score:3, Interesting)

    by koan ( 80826 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @08:12AM (#49544449)

    I love the Hubble, love the pictures and the data, seriously one of the best investment we have made up there.

    The single most mind blowing photo for me?
    Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
    http://www.nasa.gov/images/con... [nasa.gov]

    Plenty Hubble photos are far more beautiful, but the sheer scale of it, the light of other times.

    • The single most mind blowing photo for me? Hubble eXtreme Deep Field http://www.nasa.gov/images/con... [nasa.gov]

      Too bad the picture was photobombed by Milky Way attention whoring stars.

    • seriously one of the best investment we have made up there.

      This is one of the reasons funding doesn't always go where it would make science progress the better. Hubble outcome is visually attractive and nice (photos). Other fields, particle accelerators, neutrino research etc... that people hardly understand, may not gather the same amount of enthusiasm.

      • Other fields, particle accelerators, neutrino research etc... that people hardly understand, may not gather the same amount of enthusiasm.

        While I agree that people hardly understand other fields, sometimes it's not a bad thing that they're not enthusiastic.

        There was plenty of enthusiasm against the LHC. My memory isn't what it used to be, but I don't recall another scientific project of that scale that faced as much public, and even government, concern in my lifetime. Some of those people sounded like they were on the verge of getting out the pitchforks and torches.

        Cassini having plutonium fuel was about as close as I can recall, but ev

        • Cassini having plutonium fuel was about as close as I can recall, but even that was a blip by comparison to the LHC.

          The Cassini flyby was before Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, the rise of clickbait journalism has made it very difficult to discriminate between genuine public concern and the meme-of-the-moment.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Galilee ( 90424 )

      I did not like that picture the first time I saw it because I thought it was an overly busy collage. Then I realized that it was one single picture. Finally I realized that if I stood outside at night and stretched out my arm as far as I can, my thumb nail would cover up enough sky to hold at least a dozen XDF pictures.

      I don't think I've ever felt so small before or since that moment.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by koan ( 80826 )

        I get how you feel, it's jaw droppingly huge, but I don't have the feeling of being small, instead the one feeling that was prominent was "I know there is life everywhere out there" and without a doubt I still believe it.

        I used to get intellectual vertigo thinking of an infinite Universe, so much so I had to think of it as a expanding sphere (and therefore finite) to settle my mind.
        Which then begged the question "What's outside the sphere?".

        So I don't bother any more =D

  • I always disliked these sort of images because I felt they were closer to an artist's conception than a real image, since they are processed and interpolated so much. Now I regret not looking at the recent /. article on that very subject.

    • Re:Shopped! (Score:5, Informative)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @08:34AM (#49544555) Homepage

      So you've basically failed to understand why they're necessary for astronomers to make sense of things?

      Hubble isn't up there taking photographs with a camera .. the only way to interpret the images is with the false color stuff.

      The Hubble images aren't artists conceptions, but they're not straight up camera pictures either. They're the actual real things, just processed to make humans be able to understand them.

      • Re:Shopped! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by disposable60 ( 735022 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @08:44AM (#49544623) Journal

        Right on - you can hear what, seven octaves?
        You can _see_ less than one, and there's lots of useful information outside that range. If some fundie complains that it's all lies because it has the word 'false' in it, ask them whether they believe infrared cameras show 'real' image. Same color-mapping principles.

  • Best 25 Pictures as Video (Score:3)

    by rtoz ( 2530056 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @08:37AM (#49544583) Homepage
    We can watch this video [youtube.com] to see the best 25 of Stunning Images taken by Hubble Space Telescope in 25 Years.

  • PerkinElmer (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Needs2BeSaid ( 4062029 )
    Why on Earth is PerkinElmer still in business after knowingly messing up the mirror? They only had to pay $25 million for their "mistake". How much did all the investigation, training, preparation and the actual flight to Hubble cost the tax payers?

  • Time is relative. (Score:5, Funny)

    by b0r0din ( 304712 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @08:47AM (#49544633)

    Hubble only feels like 24.99996 years old.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Hubble only feels like 24.99996 years old.

      Isn't it the other way? 25 years on the surface of the earth would mean MORE time has passed for something that's in Earth's orbit - time slows the deeper you are in a gravity well.

      So technically, Hubble more than 25 years old by now, even though on the surface of Earth, only 25 years has passed.

      • Hubble is moving much faster than us. Relativity says it experiences less time, not more.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      First the lens error, and now we find it has a Pentium.

  • Thank You! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @09:15AM (#49544811)
    For anyone who was paying attention at the time when it was launched, the fact that Hubble has stayed functional this long is a pretty big deal. The drama that unfolded after it was launched, with the mirror problems and subsequent corrective missions, was an amazing feat of engineering.

    Politicians and others jumped on the anti-Hubble bandwagon pretty quickly, and at the time it was another bad day for science in the early 90's as the SCSC(Desertron) was decommissioned.

    Then the mirror was fixed... and we saw the pictures.

    In all of human history, no one could have imagined that mankind would be able to peer back in time and deep into the depths of space as Hubble has allowed us to.

    In all the imaginings of the earliest self aware humans, to the priests of ancient Babylon who studied the stars, to Galileo and Edwin Hubble himself, the images and knowledge that Hubble has bestowed on us are riches beyond compare.

    Thank you Hubble and all who have been involved in the project.

  • .... NASA nearly had to rename it 'Magoo'.

  • Flythrough video [youtube.com] -- I have no objection to enhanced pictures but I do want to understand exactly what I am looking at. There can't possibly be enough parallax for any traditional stereo imaging.

    Where does the depth information in a video like this come from, and what has happened here--has the image been basically digitized and then completely regenerated by shifting every image pixel in it according to its distance from the virtual "camera" position?

  • The Hubble (Score:3, Informative)

    by tquasar ( 1405457 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @10:07AM (#49545219)
    Create an account at Heavens-Above to get time and direction to see space objects. http://www.heavens-above.com/ [heavens-above.com] It's a great resource.
  • I have a small 'scope but my area has become too light polluted for me to see. I could see Andromeda and other objects but can't now. I would drive 45 miles to a remote, dark location but haven't done that in a few years.

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