Slashdot Mirror

Didn't they determine that the universe was 15 billion years old (there abouts) because they observed light from stars 15 billion light years away? That's what I remember from intro to astronomy anyway. Plus, look at this http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/ 2007/01/image/a/format/web_print doesn't that say 6.5 billion years ago, as in the light observed has traveled 6.5 billion light years? So what's the big deal about one billion? I don't get it. Oh wait, he was standing on the planet Earth when he saw them...ok, big whoop.

Here's HubbleSite's full release on the topic -- more comprehensive than the BBC article imo: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/ 2007/01/

Here are the press release links: Nature, Hubble Space Telescope, European Space Agency and Subaru Telescope. The COSMOS project web page can be found there.

Here.

I've tried to find something about whether this tells us something new about the properties of dark matter, but so far no luck. Anyone have a link to something more informative?

M31 is ok, but nothing special.

These are my current favorites:

A Zoo of Galaxies
Pismis 24 and NGC 6357 (looks like something from The Neverending Story)
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (absolutely incredible)

M31 is ok, but nothing special.

These are my current favorites:

A Zoo of Galaxies
Pismis 24 and NGC 6357 (looks like something from The Neverending Story)
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (absolutely incredible)

M31 is ok, but nothing special.

These are my current favorites:

A Zoo of Galaxies
Pismis 24 and NGC 6357 (looks like something from The Neverending Story)
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (absolutely incredible)

Best image ever. This is not debatable. There are some other extraordinary images in the nebula category, and some excellent ones in the galaxy category as well. There are also a handful of incredible images in the cosmology and exotic categories.

Not sure if we can directly detect water signatures, but scientists can at least estimate the range from their stars, the type of star, and basic atmospheric composition. I guess these could be enough to make an educated guess of their temperature at least.

Here's the news of the first atmospheric measurement by Hubble in 2001, and then keep in mind it's not even specially equipped for these things like these "next gen missions": http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/ 2001/38

Is man causing changes now? You bet.

      Then please explain why the other planets

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/ 2006/19/image/a

      are also warming up? Are we causing THAT too?

Because of how the Hubble Telescope works, it would do a very crummy job of imaging Earth.

But then you would be wrong. Artisits have nothing to do with these pictures. Several images are taken in different spectrums which are grayscale versions of those pictures. Then the grayscale is put into red, green, or blue only color and three of them combined to make one picture. False color yes, because the spectrums the grayscale pictures are taken are not necessarily red, green and blue, but artists have nothing to do with it. Sometimes they choose color spectrums to enhance, sometimes to make it look natural, but artists never touch these images.

Intersting stuff.. but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?

A greater understanding of the laws of gravity. We can construct simulations of colliding galaxies, but being able to see the real thing helps confirm those theories.

This is a very cool object, and because it's (relatively) close, it's visible to the human eyeball in a large amateur telescope, at a dark sky site (not QUITE like this Hubble image, obviously).

I've tracked it down in my old 18" Newtonian/Dobsonian. With averted vision, you can see two "tails" twisting off the pair, much further out in the field than these Hubble images. Here's what it looks like in an amateur scope, but imagine it as just a dim hint in the eyepiece:

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/1997/34/images/ c/formats/web.jpg

It's nothing at all like the Hubble image... just a hint of grey glow in the eyepiece, but still... there is something about seeing the actual photons from the object hitting your retina that's exciting, for us amateur astronomy geeks, anyway.

You can find a really high resolution copy (3915x3885 as a TIFF or JPEG) of the image here. Hmm, this might make a pretty desktop wallpaper.

Slashdot wants more characters per line Sky above 37Â375"N 122Â2222"W at Sat 2005 Jul 2 20:11 Slashdot wants more characters per line ScienceDaily Magazine -- News Summaries Slashdot wants more characters per line BBC NEWS | Science/Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Science News Online Slashdot wants more characters per line Molecule of the Day Slashdot wants more characters per line The Loom Slashdot wants more characters per line Cosmic Variance Slashdot wants more characters per line Scientific American news Slashdot wants more characters per line Sciencegate Slashdot wants more characters per line New Scientist Slashdot wants more characters per line LiveScience Slashdot wants more characters per line Science And Politics Slashdot wants more characters per line Chris C Mooney Slashdot wants more characters per line symmetry Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Discover Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Mathematician OTD Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line ESA - Cassini-Huygens Slashdot wants more characters per line NASA - Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line HiRISE Operations Center -- HiROC Slashdot wants more characters per line Cassini Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Slashdot wants more characters per line Saturn Today Slashdot wants more characters per line HubbleSite - NewsCenter Slashdot wants more characters per line MESSENGER Web Site Slashdot wants more characters per line Deep Impact: Your First Look Inside a Comet! Slashdot wants more characters per line Pluto, Charon, and other Kuiper Belt Objects including, Sedna, 2003 UB313, as well as Asteroids and Comets. Slashdot wants more characters per line Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Pharyngula

The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit).

The term "objective" is a value judgement, and one that goes out the window once you decide to shoot one subject rather than another.

The question you are asking is, "How can my photo reflect the reality in front of the camera", which I think is the wrong question because it is an inherently value-based judgement and can be affected by everything from composition to lens. The question you should be asking is, "How can I get useful information out of my photo and convey it accurately to the viewer?".

I suggest you look at astronomy, or other fields where they use cameras as a data-gathering instrument rather than an artist's tool. They understand that the camera is not "objective" any more than another instrument, so what they do is document what camera, instrument, and settings were used, and convey that along with the picture. This allows them to figure out what the accuracy or tolerances of the camera are, and they accept that it is not an absolute, "objective" view, just a reading from an instrument.

This is important because false-color imagery is often used in astronomy, since telescopes often see into frequencies not visible to the human eye, such as infra-red, ultra-violet, even x-ray and gamma rays. There is no pretending that "this is what you would see if you were there", because they are often looking at things that you would not be able to see. An false-color image is like a map with elevation markings - the colors represent data, not visible light.

Look at this image, which has a 211 Meg TIFF file, or Mars rver image in false color. With those pictures, you can be sure to contact NASA and get te actual settings, time, and specs of the camera used so that you will know what kinds of inaccuracies are likely in the picutures. It's that kind of information that you would use to find tolerances for the image data so you can be sure just *how much* inaccuracy an image has. NASA doesn't pretend that they have the Eye Of God, just a very accurate instrument.

The logical extreme of such arguments is that the only "real" images in the digital age are taken with black-box cameras with all settings on "auto" and nothing adjusted afterward.

The oppisite, actually. The best that you could do is to do whatever you need to do to make the image informative, but tell the viewer all the editing steps that were done and the settings and equipment it was taken with. I realize that newspapers don't have the space to do it with, but surely a web publication can?

Pointing Hubble at the moon is also a no-go, because it was made to look at objects far far away.

i'm mr clarke,

in response,

what is wrong with the hubblesite dot org?
why go somewhere else to look at hubble images.
http://hubblesite.org/

No one talks about the pictures the Hubble just took...

That's why I have this on my personalized Google. Granted they're not all Hubble images, but there's certainly a significant number of photos for your perusal.

Budget cuts and safety concerns were the reasons given for cancellation of the 2006 repair mission, and any future such missions are currently speculative possibilities "under consideration." http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/future/ has more on this, as does http://hubble.nasa.gov/.

But don't let actual facts get in the way of your ignorant, uninformed and nonsensical attacking of someone else for actually knowing them.

More various astromovies:

Lunar Transit by the International Space Station Alpha: http://members.aol.com/mrtsp91/iss.htm

Meteor explodes in Earth's atmosphere:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981123.html

A Martian dust devil passes rover Spirit:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050426.html

Fast moving stars orbiting black hole SgrA* in the Milky Way's center:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001220.html
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/vide o/vid-02-02.mpg

Dynamic rings, wisps and jets of matter and antimatter around the pulsar in the Crab Nebula:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0052/movies. html

Cat's Eye nebula expanding:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990916.html

Variable stars "twinkling" in globular cluster M3 over a single night:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041012.html

Shock wave of supernova SN1987A creates hot spots in surrounding material:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2004/09/video/a

To find more videos try searching NASA's astronomy picture of the day archive: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/apod/apod_sear ch

I *heart* astronomy :]
Me too.

The crab nebula in motion:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1996/22/video/a

Herbig-Haro object 47 in the Orion Nebula, look at this! This is similiar to the "Pillars of creation in M16.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HH47_animation. gif

V838 expanding in Monoceros:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030402.html

The ebb and flow of clouds around Jupiters Red Spot:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001123.html

You can always downsample the 9500 x 7400 full-res version.

Well, you don't need more proof of His Noodliness existance than this

Cute picture, but still nothing compares to this. It will make you feel insignificant real quick.

Hubble's highest resolution should be common geek knowledge, like Mount Everest's height or the distance to the moon. Anyway, here's a quote:

"Images from the HRC are smaller in pixel size, 1,000 pixels square, but have a finer resolution, 0.025 arcseconds per pixel. The HRC is preferred for images of planets, or objects appearing smaller on the sky, where higher resolution outweighs larger field of view."

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2005/34/image/m

The article theorizes that the putative brown dwarf culprit may have been missed if it were located in a region of the sky with lots of stars as background, e.g. the milky way. In fact it could be anywhere and could have been missed easily.

The scientist who found Pluto was looking for it, was very talented and got lucky.

I don't think the whole sky is being surveyed for moving objects. Indeed a recent piggyback project that used serendipitous tracks on Hubble plates discovered hundreds of asteroids. Yet asteroids are much more numerous, typically brighter and move much more quickly across the sky than any brown dwarf that would fit the data. To find them the Hubble scope made use of very long exposures and of the huge parallax the telescope had while orbiting the Earth.

Hence the hypothesis of an as-yet, undiscovered close-by brown dwarf is not implausible.

BTW I tried to help for the asteroid Hubble project in a small way by automating the finding of the hallmark tracks, but it turned out using graduate students was faster and more efficient.

Like this eye?

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2003/11/image/a

Personally, I think the two big problems are a) light gathering in most astrophotography is far better than the human eye is capable of, and b) there's a lot of 'false-color' imaging that isn't adequately labeled as such. The famous 'Pillars of Creation' image isn't a real-light image; it's a combination of several (non-RGB) filters. (Of course, it's still beautiful.)

Many books now, though, give real depictions of what objects will look like through scopes and binoculars, or at least point out the difference. I'm thinking specifically of The Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide by H. C. Pennington and The Backyard Astronomers' Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer. These books show M42 are a slight blotch of white against the black, and explain that that's what you'll see when you're not using cameras with long exposure times.

(Astronomers are, as a rule, mystified by plasma-dynamic events, leading them to talk about "hot gases", "stellar plumes", "galactic jets", "magnetars", "dark matter", "dark energy", and worse. For most, their only exposure to anything like plasma in school was an unphysical mathematical construct called MHD, so they are worse off than if they'd skipped class. (Hawking is often quoted, with no trace of irony, saying "the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.") For those of us even a little more familiar with real plasma effects, astronomical press releases are no end of hilarity.)

Plasma double layers aren't mysterious. They develop naturally as the diffuse particles containing ions tend toward equilibrium. Variation in composition, ionicity, and density in a diffuse plasma gather at boundary layers between regions, making the space between the boundaries much more uniform, and concentrating mass, electric fields, and current flow. Highly-stressed double layers tend to explode; on the sun they call it a "coronal mass ejection". On another star it may be called lots of things.

In one of those plasma ball toys, you can see double-layer tubes connecting the electrode in the center with the transparent ball. You see them because the current density is high enough to put the plasma it runs through in "glow-discharge" mode, exactly as in a neon sign or St. Elmo's Fire. The other two modes are "invisible" and "arcing". The former is common throughout the universe (and detectable only indirectly, as you might imagine) such as between the earth and the sun, between star systems, and even between galaxies. The latter is what you see in a lightning bolt, on the surface of the sun, or in one of those spotlights they used to use at movie premieres. Astronomical glow-discharge events (with the exception of earth's polar aurorae) are usually confused with "shock waves".

The most beautiful astronomical glow-discharging double-layer structure I know of is M2-9 in Ophiucus. "In this image, neutral oxygen is shown in red, once-ionized nitrogen in green, and twice-ionized oxygen in blue."

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/37/images/ a/formats/full_jpg.jpgHere, (14.5 MB), is a jpg of the nebula so you don't have to download that stupid viewer.

Big versions are found here:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2005/37/image/a+warn

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/37/images/ a/formats/1280_wallpaper.jpg

According to the Hubble site: "Precise observations made with the Hubble telescope confirm that the interstellar interloper is the closest neutron star ever seen. The object also doesn't have a companion star that would affect its appearance. Now located 200 light-years away in the southern constellation Corona Australis, it will swing by Earth at a safe distance of 170". The field strength of EM disturbances and the denisty of radiated particles will fall off as the square of the distances. So a neutron star quake in this nearest neighbor would be (50000^2)/(170^2) times stronger than the effects reported in TFA. Thats a 86505 fold increase in power.
yeah, you gonna need to put on some pretty strong SPF suntan lotion for that bad boy.

I still think that the definition of a planet should hinge on how easily it can be viewed from Earth. Personally, I don't think that any Kuiper belt object is a planet. Pluto is not a planet. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn can all be easily observed with the naked eye. Uranus usually requires binoculars to be seen, and Neptune some kind of telescope (however amateur)... Pluto, and the rest of the Kuiper belt, are a very difficult thing to view. If you're an amateur astronomer, you're going to be able to discern a speck of faint light from a "medium" sized telescope.. That is, 6" reflector or so. I would love to see the definition involve being able to view the celestial object as a disc from earth's surface. Hell, even the HST barely discerns much more than a grayish disc. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1996/09/

Well, that's cute and all, except that we actually do have photographs of this occurring. Just because you don't know about what's going on doesn't mean the sciences don't.

Sure, there's a chance we don't understand what we're looking at. There's also a chance that evolution is wrong, or that mathematics is wrong, or that we're all shackled up in Plato's cave. That said, the Skeptic movement died out some 2500 years ago, because living your life by saying "you can't prove that" is futile. Sure, we can't prove it. But we've got damned strong models, huge amounts of supporting data, and some surprisingly pretty pictures.

Find something credible that suggests that a cloud of hydrogen acting under its own gravity wouldn't collapse and form a star, and we'll talk. Unless, of course, you think gravity is suspect too? Or, maybe hydrogen just doesn't fuse? Perhaps Wile E Coyote was putting dynamite in the particle colliders, trying to keep us from accreting a road runner.

By the way, it's one of my pet peeves when someone who can't even spell peeve gets on a soapbox ranting at other people about their fundamental capacities.

I'd say mod parent down, but given that he doesn't seem to believe in simple gravity, it's not clear whether he'll realize in what direction he's going.

These are the best space-related pictures ever. This is pretty good, too. Another.

The sun is just a single, average star. Deep space is where the real beauty lies. I think it's interesting that some these pictures are actually billions of years old. Imagine if some intelligent civilization out there is marveling at new pictures of our galaxy starting to form billions of years ago.

These are the best space-related pictures ever. This is pretty good, too. Another.

The sun is just a single, average star. Deep space is where the real beauty lies. I think it's interesting that some these pictures are actually billions of years old. Imagine if some intelligent civilization out there is marveling at new pictures of our galaxy starting to form billions of years ago.

These are the best space-related pictures ever. This is pretty good, too. Another.

The sun is just a single, average star. Deep space is where the real beauty lies. I think it's interesting that some these pictures are actually billions of years old. Imagine if some intelligent civilization out there is marveling at new pictures of our galaxy starting to form billions of years ago.

Glad they heard it because how often can astronomers believe what they see? This Hubble picture? Bah! We've got to hear it! http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1998/05/

Actually, this is incorrect:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/

Hubble doesn't usually image the moon because imaging time is spent better on other targets.

It is true that it can't image the sun for fear of damaging the internal stuff, but then the sun is much, much, much brighter than the moon.

"85 million miles from Earth..." http://hubblesite.org/

You are of course competing with other recent eye of sauron lookalikes. So no hard feelings?

Direct link to tiff from instructional grandparent post and from page linked to in parent post.

Additional unnecessary comment with EXCLAMATION POINT!

Direct link to image(s) from instructional parent post in case you can't follow instructions. .tiff is on the left hand side.

Now I can see the eye of the galaxy jesii staring at me in HIGH RES!

Hoag's Object. So unusual they call it an object!

Go here:

STScI Press Release

Click on the top image, then scroll down to find unannotated version of images and click on it. Then you'll find a big TIFF file of this picture.

Enjoy.

You can look at the most recent Hubble photographs (and a fairly extensive archive) at: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/.

Take a good look at those photos. How would you feel if NASA pulled the plug on such a successful project tomorrow, without a replacement for many years?

I think it would be a terrible shame if such an asset to the space program -- something that has had huge benefits to the world of Astronomy and science -- was just pulled out of the sky because of money troubles. It would be a sad reflection on the world we live in.

First off, we can't send up another Hubble for cheap - it has to be designed, built, and launched, all of which is expensive. To maintain the current telescope, all we have to do is launch, and as a fraction of what NASA is already planning to spend on launches, it's pretty cheap.

Secondly, Hubble is not "obsolete". Every single time it has been serviced, its capabilities have been upgraded with new instrumentation, vastly increasing its sensitivity and usefulness. Hubble has quite modern CCDs with exquisite sensitivity, and a servicing mission will install even better equipment. Here are the first images that were taken with the ACS camera installed in 2002. Compare those with this early WFPC2 image (an earlier camera). The servicing missions have increased Hubble's sensitivity by literally orders of magnitude, resulting in many incredible new discoveries.

We should absolutely fix this telescope.