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Science

NASA releases first Chandra photos 37

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-space-telescopes dept.
Gedanken writes "Nasa has released the first images from the new Chandra Project X-Ray telescope and they are spectacular. It will be researching high energy events such as supernovas, quasars and black holes. "
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NASA releases first Chandra photos More

NASA releases first Chandra photos

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  • No its not useless as a piece of evidence. Linear colour maps aren't appropriate for all purposes. In this particular case the colour map was chosen to highlight features of interest to astrophysicists.

    Non linear colour maps are all over the place. They're much more common than linear maps. Go buy some Fuji Velvia for your 35 mm camera. It takes awfully nice portraits doesn't it? It's because the colour map is tweaked to provide pleasing flesh tones.

    This isn't any different than a mathemetician using a logarithmic scale to do a plot of a function with exponential growth.

  • Aren't X-Rays harmful to supernovas? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those bastards at NASA really just don't care about the health of Supernovas. The last I heard was that repeated exposure to X-Rays is harmful and should be avoided. How dare they! It's time someone made a stand for the health of the cosmos.
  • You could read a newspaper from half a mile away or see the letters of a stop sign from 12 miles. That's the kind of strength and accuracy packed into the world's most powerful X-ray telescope -- NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

    Wow.. works in Xray too.. reminds me of that video camera that could see thru clothing (kinda)..

    "Now, the new NudieCam! Using fabulous X-ray technology developed by NASA, you can video tape women in their undies, from up to 12 miles away!"

    hah!

    ---
  • And what about the Earth! And all those X-Rays floading the Earth!!!

    NASA should be covering the atmosphere with lead to protect us, instead of the useless telescope stuff.

    George

    Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year.
  • Ok, just what do they look like, then??

  • Oh My God... they slashdotted NASA. YOU BASTARDS!
  • ...if they just made those pictures with the GIMP.
  • Hmmm...there might be a market for that for all you pervs out there. =)

  • Re:What the... (Score:3)

    by mperrin ( 41687 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @09:37AM (#1723786) Homepage

    X-rays aren't visible to human eyes at all, so of course you have to process the image to display them in visible wavelengths. This is standard practice for all astronomy outside of visible light (which is most astronomy these days, actually.) The image of Cas A was mapped onto a red scale, where

    white = highest intensity
    yellow = high intensity
    red = low intensity
    black = lowest or no intensity

    The quasar image was done similarly, only using a blue scale rather than red. Right now, these colors are pretty much arbitrary, but later on, we'll probably start coming up with color maps that have a bit more science behind them, especially once we get into spectroscopic imaging.

    Trust me, you don't want us to start displaying the images in "true-color" X-ray unless you have some passing desire to fry your eyes. Oops. ;-)

    - Marshall
    mperrin@cfa.harvard.edu

  • Are any of the images large enough to set as a background (without major stretching)? I haven't looked at many of them (due to the slow server), but the few that I saw seemed too small for such purposes... -ElJefe

  • Remember, the site is mirrored at both chandra.nasa.gov and chandra.harvard.edu, although both are being slow right now...

    *grin* So all of us here at the CfA packed into our main auditorium to watch the press conference via NASA TV (Chandra is being run from here in Cambridge, but the press conference was down at NASA HQ in DC.) As we were walking out of the auditorium around 2, after the conference ended with a display of the two URLs, I overheard one of the astronomers up ahead of me mutter under his breath "OK, now we're gonna get slashdotted." And indeed, by the time I got back to my office, the chandra server was already being reaaaal sloooooow. AFAIK, it's a pretty hefty Sun, but I guess not quite hefty enough.

    Luckily, there are other servers which have all the actual data on them for people to do work with. Unluckily, those are all internal-only right now, so y'all are going to have to wait a bit.


  • The outer wave may be related to an awesome sonic boom resulting from this collision.


    Funny.. I never knew there was an atmosphere in space =P
  • there were some pretty big tiff images there that i saw. the tiff of Cass A was 3+MB. could probably do some resizing with that to make it wall paper size.

    imabug
  • at least it's not Vogon poetry

  • Re:Desktop Backgrounds? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    NASA's stock image gallery [nasa.gov] has pictures in thumbnail, medium, and large format up to 2k by 2k pixels. If you can get through while it is slashdotted.
  • They're definitely doing some Photoshop work on thes. X-rays don't look like fire, last time I checked.
  • Fuji Velvia has incredibly high saturation and fine grain. It is the landscape chrome of choice. However, it butchers skin, which is its major shortcoming.

    Fuji makes some nice portrait films, mainly NPH.
  • YOU IDIOT!!!! Chandra is not named after a chick. In case you forgot, (or just plain don't know) Chandra is short for Chandrasekhar. A Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist.
  • Yes and no. The image is of the x-ray portion
    of the spectrum, but the colours in the image
    that you see merely represent the luminosity
    (or number of photons) recieved in each detector
    pixel. The colours chosen are arbitrary. It is
    customary to use shades of red for x-ray images,
    as opposed to shades of grey for optical images.
    It certainly makes them prettier too!

    Ale
  • While trying to get to the press kit anyway...
  • Who said they didn't use GIMP inside their luxerous Villa @ the bahama's.
  • Theres a Chandra image of Cassiopia A on Astronomy Picture of the day (27/8/99) [nasa.gov] which is desktop sized. No doubt they'll have other ones over the next few days.
  • Yes, I know that X-rays aren't visible to the human eye (it'd make airport security an interesting procedure ;)

    So, you have to map the higher frequencies down to the visible range. Conversely, night-vision goggles kick infrared light up into the visible range.

    The point I was trying to make is that their mapping function is non-linear; they use a damped Boltzman (black-body) distribution, adjusted to look like fire. Pretty picture for the media, but utterly useless as a piece of evidence.

    r

  • We should make a Beowulf cluster of those babies. That would ROCK!

    /* Just kidding. */
  • Sadly, chandra.harvard.edu (the machine) is only an ultra1, but it appears to have survived the onslaught so far. The number of hits is outrageous compared to what it's used to, though.

    -zeno
  • always a worthy cause. sorry, I'm biased ;)
  • The color mapping for the Cas A image was chosen strictly to make it a pretty picture and, as the previous poster mentioned, following the historical convention of using heat colors for X-ray images.

    One of the Chandra scientists (Norbert Schulz) has assembled a color image of Cas A where each color represents a different spetral region. It's a gorgeous image and the colors are actually significant, but it was unfortunately not ready in time for the press conference. I'm going to try to make a similar image next week if I have time.

    -zeno
  • What ever happened to that movie? I saw it then Broken Lizard came into town, and then it just sort of vanished.

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