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I don't know the reasons why hst uses an encrypted data stream, but it is in line with their policy regarding the public release of data. The principal investigator for the observations has a 1 year proprietary period on the data. This is because it represents a lot of work to plan in detail how the observations should be carried out and to justify the observations to the time allocation committee - so if you do the work of figuring out how the observations are to be done and why they should be done, you get a one year head-start on analyzing the data. After the one year period is up, the raw data is released to the public - anyone else can access it at http://archive.stsci.edu/

Yeah, in the interests of brevity, I used "essentially a successor" with the "ambiguity dial" cranked to 11. ;)

Einer makes an important point though, and I hope people don't get the wrong impression from my wording!

You can learn tons more about WFC3 here: http://www.stsci.edu/hst/wfc3

good luck with the proposal Einer!

-Grant

Also notice how the anony-coward did not address the encryption downlink. All he did was stress that all the data is stored at some website.

From what I could gather doing a simple web search, the Hubble downlink comes down to Goddard Space Flight Center via the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). It looks as if they have a web site...

        http://msp.gsfc.nasa.gov/tdrss/oview.html ...and Wikipedia has an article as well.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDRSS

So, unless one can hack into the TDRSS system, I guess you're out of luck in getting the raw telemetry stream from the Observatory. As for the encryption, I would imagine it would come from a requirement that all commands to and all information received from Hubble would have a single point of origin, namely Goddard, and that encryption is to prove the link is valid. After all, you wouldn't want someone else commanding the satellite to do something that could damage it (like point it toward the Sun, for example).

What ARE they doing on Hubble?

As for what is being observed with HST, another simple web search provided the two following links:

        http://www-int.stsci.edu/~inr/thisweek1/previous15 .html (abstracts and general info)

        http://www.stsci.edu/observing/weekly_timeline.htm l (for detail down to the second)

It's not that difficult, people.

Also notice how the anony-coward did not address the encryption downlink. All he did was stress that all the data is stored at some website.

From what I could gather doing a simple web search, the Hubble downlink comes down to Goddard Space Flight Center via the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). It looks as if they have a web site...

        http://msp.gsfc.nasa.gov/tdrss/oview.html ...and Wikipedia has an article as well.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDRSS

So, unless one can hack into the TDRSS system, I guess you're out of luck in getting the raw telemetry stream from the Observatory. As for the encryption, I would imagine it would come from a requirement that all commands to and all information received from Hubble would have a single point of origin, namely Goddard, and that encryption is to prove the link is valid. After all, you wouldn't want someone else commanding the satellite to do something that could damage it (like point it toward the Sun, for example).

What ARE they doing on Hubble?

As for what is being observed with HST, another simple web search provided the two following links:

        http://www-int.stsci.edu/~inr/thisweek1/previous15 .html (abstracts and general info)

        http://www.stsci.edu/observing/weekly_timeline.htm l (for detail down to the second)

It's not that difficult, people.

Um... the moon and mars are actually two completely different things.

True enough. In fact, there has been a lot of discussion over the past year or so as to how astronomers could use the building NASA Moon infrastructure to do astrophysical science. There was a conference at STScI back in November on this topic. Turns out there are some very good reasons not to put a telescope on the lunar surface, but some excellent reasons to use the developing heavy-lift capacity for larger space-based systems and the Earth-Moon L1 point as a staging area for potential servicing.

http://www.stsci.edu/institute/center/information/ streaming/archive/AERM

Here it is: the HST archive. You can download everything that is over a year old; proposers have exclusive rights for one year. Unfortunately, the data are really raw, so they won't be usable without packages like IRAF (PyRAF). Or were you not really making a legitimate point?

It shorted, and burned enough plastic or wiring to trip the overpressure sensor (do wire shorts smell in space?). See this message from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Side A electronics are available which might be able to run a portion of the instrument. This has been expected since the first failure last summer, and "contingency" proposals are available to keep the observatory running using its other instruments (ACS has recently been the most used).

Dear Troll,

The HST Data Archive (HDA) has always been available to the public, albeit after a one-year "proprietary rights" period.

TFA is down so I'm just going by comments here.

Heidi Hammel has been on a TON of TV space documentaries. She does a lot of science and a lot of outreach.
I'd sure vote for putting her in consideration at least. I don't know about top 10, because there ARE a lot to choose from
http://heritage.stsci.edu/1999/29/bio/bio_hammel.h tml
Inexplicably, there's no page for Dr Hammel, but she is mini-bio'd in this article about a minor planet named for her:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3530_Hammel

Caroline was William Herschel's sister. She actually did a TON of the gruntwork for Herschel's massive life's work, and saw essentially no reward for it. There are a LOT of women in past centuries that did brilliant work in obscurity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel

I don't think the people doing this list did ANY research at all.

IIRC the JWST has very poor visible light capability. AFAIK only the FGS-TF imaging unit can even support visible light, and it is intended to pull in only narrow frequency bands at a time. The other three imaging units are all infrared (mid and near.) This unit is also used for attitude guidance.

That sounds somewhat like the blackboard architecture, have you looked into it? I agree that's much closer to how nature works. Imagine if all the cells in your body had to take turns :)

Here is another link that may be worthy of checking:

Space.com article.

And the original statement from Space Telescope Science Institute (this was edited out by the editor...not that I mind being edited, btw):

STScI Anomaly Report

I prefer this for feeling insignificant.

Well maybe not insignificant, but at least well aware of what the universe thinks of our place in it ...

...if there's a spike in the "forest" for NGC 7319 in its quasar's spectrum, I can't see it. That's why detractors blather on about "fortuitous voids" and other question-begging deux ex machinae instead of simply pointing to the Lyman notches and pronouncing "I told you so!" (can you see them missing the chance if they had one?).

You might also want to grab a copy of this image, drop it into a graphics editor (here is a free one) and have fun with the intensity curves (Layer, Curves, drag the centre of the curve left to 50,160 (scale 0-255), then grab the curve where it crosses the 25% mark and drag that to 27,36). Now think about what you see, as you toy with that curve.

Since the US is currently dumping $6 billion a month in Iraq ($9 billion+ of which can not even be accounted for since the war started,) why not launch an initiative to launch a satellite by an organization other than NASA?

Provide an incentive (say cash) to find a cheaper way to design and launch a satellite into space. NASA, as an arm of a bogged-down and partisan government, is clearly not using innovative and cost-cutting solutions to further its own goals. Take the US government funding out of the equation and maybe something will get done. If NASA has too much on its agenda, its time to find other qualified people who can do the job.

In my humble opinion, space exploration is just as important scientific study as any other out there. The images that the Hubble has delivered to the world are indeed beautiful, amazing and priceless.

See: http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/galindex.html

What happened? I remember when we were told that aiming Hubble at the Moon or the Earth would destroy it's sensitive instruments.

Hubble can do short images of the moon with no problem, aside from the challenge of guiding. It does images of the earth all the time. These are called earth calibrations and they serve as the basis of flat fields with which HST images are calibrated. You can't see anything in them, though, because the earth is too close to focus on, and the telescope is moving at ~300 miles/min, so the images are just blurry streaks across cloud tops. That's why they make good flat fields.

Not long after launch, HST did some "imaging" of the sun. The idea was to point the telescope 180 degrees away from the sun while using a small backwards-pointing light collector on the original WF/PC to pre-flood the CCD with solar ultraviolet. It never got used , though. HST Proposal 1478: WF/PC UV FLOOD GUIDING TECHNIQUE VERIFICATION, if you're interested. Here's an example image.

So the only major solar system object that HST has never imaged-besides the objects we don't know about-is Mercury. It's too close to the sun. The aperture door will close if we try to point there.

What happened? I remember when we were told that aiming Hubble at the Moon or the Earth would destroy it's sensitive instruments.

Hubble can do short images of the moon with no problem, aside from the challenge of guiding. It does images of the earth all the time. These are called earth calibrations and they serve as the basis of flat fields with which HST images are calibrated. You can't see anything in them, though, because the earth is too close to focus on, and the telescope is moving at ~300 miles/min, so the images are just blurry streaks across cloud tops. That's why they make good flat fields.

Not long after launch, HST did some "imaging" of the sun. The idea was to point the telescope 180 degrees away from the sun while using a small backwards-pointing light collector on the original WF/PC to pre-flood the CCD with solar ultraviolet. It never got used , though. HST Proposal 1478: WF/PC UV FLOOD GUIDING TECHNIQUE VERIFICATION, if you're interested. Here's an example image.

So the only major solar system object that HST has never imaged-besides the objects we don't know about-is Mercury. It's too close to the sun. The aperture door will close if we try to point there.

Define close???
The Hubble orbits 350 miles above the earth and the average distance to the moon is 238,857 miles.

I'd hardly consider 238,500 (apprx) miles very close =-)

Considering the Hubble routinely examines objects hundred of millions to billions of light years away from Earth (See the See the Hubble Deep Field survey), I'd consider ~239K miles to be right the fuck on top of. ;)

If it's really a problem, there are a myriad of solutions -- Numeric and numarray for lots of numbers, psyco for JIT optimizations, Pyrex for a Python-like syntax that compiles to C (and can be as fast as C if you use it correctly), and lots of other new options as well -- IronPython is supposed to be faster than CPython (the standard implementation), there's quite a bit of work on type inference, PyPy is working hard at compiling Python to fast C, Boost can inline C++ code... there's a huge number of options.

I've never encountered someone who had to throw a project away because of performance issues in Python. Sometimes they have to change the design, move some small parts of C, make better use of other people's libraries, and always of course driven by profiling -- but that's the kind of refactoring that always happens in development. And for a very large number of applications it simply is never a problem.

It would take a prohibitively long time for a ground-based telescope to acquire data for a project such as this.

As a Marylander and a rabid Bush-hater, I am not a big fan of Mikulski's aggressively pork-filled political record, no matter how much it benefits me personally.

Barb's #1 legislative priority is Maryland jobs. If a proposal has impact on local employment, she will vote accordingly. Only if the bill is relatively job-neutral will she consider other factors (good of the nation, desires of constituents, party philosophy, etc).

For example, up until a few months ago when GM finally closed the AstroVan factory, Barb was notorious for giving Detroit big slobbering rim jobs at every opportunity.

While that might be a tolerable trait in a state official or a House Rep, Senators are *supposed* to look at the bigger picture and Do the Right Thing.

Personally, I don't know if repairing Hubble is a good idea or not. But I know for sure Senator Barb doesn't care about that at all, not while STSCI employs dozens of Marylanders.

I really like having Ms. Mikulski as senator, and I've voted for her each time she's been elected, but I should point out that the reason that she's pushing this isn't that she cares about getting hi-res pictures of aliens. The Space Telescope Science Institute is in Baltimore, MD, her home state, as well as NASA's Goddard facility.

That's what representatives of any sort do: they fight for their local interests. If they didn't do that, the voters would elect somebody who did. Unfortunately, without a fixed budget cap, that generally means deals of the form "You vote for my thing, so I'll vote for your thing, and the only one who loses is the guy who eventually has to pay off the debt."

So while I like Ms. Mikulski, and I support the "measly" few dozens of millions of dollars it would take to keep getting great science from Hubble, I thought a bit of disclosure would be appropriate.

No. Hubble regularly looks at Earth for calibration purposes. See: http://www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/shst2/williams r.html

The NASA James Webb Space Telescope" is "on the way". I've heard the
images it can obtain will make the Hubble images look like
junk. Let's move on to the future rather than dwell on the past!

while the costs of building a new scope and launching it are wild-ass guesses.

You can download and view/edit/make pretty pictures with the raw data from the Hubble yourself if you want (Photoshop 7.0 at least required). Go to the stsci archive and check the "HST: ASC" box, and in the target box enter "V838-MON". Follow the directions from the search page to get the data (you will need to register with the mast association). Then, go here (the European homepage for the Hubble) and download the necessary files. When you have the raw data, you can process it to your heart's content. To check out some of the possible images that can be created, go to my fits images page. Most of the really nice Hubble shots come from the HST WFPC2, so use that to search for other things (like M16).

WFC3 and COS are still on the ground, hopefully to make it to Hubble on either a manned or robotic mission. Here's a list of past, present, and future Hubble instruments, along with links to their homepages with all the technical information you could want.

Hubble is nowhere near state of the art (some software in it is 25-30 yrs old) but it works and has exceeded the wildest expectations of it's builders. Kind of a Brooklyn Bridge in space, the first one built but still works great and setting a high standard.

The software doesn't matter, it's the front-end detectors that limit the accuracy on the acquired data. Once it's properly digitized, the software will only limit the speed it can be transmitted back to Earth. But even that speed is dwarfed by the long integration times Hubble acquires for very faint objects.

The accessibity of Hubble is what contributed to it's success. Sensor technology is a continuing evolving field, and the ability to periodically put better, more sensitive detectors onto Hubble has contributed to it remaining one of the most competitive telescopes available. When James Webb telescope is launched, it won't be upgradeable, which means it won't be able to take advantage of the great advances in sensor technology we'll probably have in the next 20 years.

Here is a better one anyway

Err, I think you mean it will be at the second Lagrange point (L2)..

Actually, it'll be in orbit round the L2 point, but now I'm just getting picky.

I think you'll find that the French physicist Lissajous had very little to do with orbital dynamics, and much more to do with fascinating sqiggly loop patterns that provide endless entertainment for thost supposed to be learning how to use an oscilloscope.

However, I should point out that even if the money were spent (and spent efficiently) on a new telescope, there's a lead time of many years on putting new telescopes in space. Hubble was originally funded in 1977 and launched in 1990. The James Webb Space Telescope isn't scheduled for launch until August of 2011, but funding for it started in 1995. This excludes that there was in both case extensive design and planning work going back at least a few years before funding started.

As a young earth creationist, why do you believe that the universe is only 6,000-7,000 years old? What in the Bible, or whichever religious text you follow, gives you cause to believe this? Do any of the gospels quote Jesus as claiming that he was born X many years after the creation? I ask because I have never understood where that particular belief comes from or why it is so prevalent.

As for your question, google found this.

Not true! If you have the camera's point spread function (or a way to estimate it) you can restore an out of focus shot with a deconvolution operation. Here's bit of software which can do such an operation. The web page includes an example. A further example is the image processing which was done on Hubble when its mirror was found to be the wrong shape.

• Observatory (Calibration, Focal Plane, Telescope, Cross-Instrument Issues)
  
• ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys)
  
• FGS (The Fine Guidance Sensors)
  
• NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera and Multi Object Spectrometer)
  
• STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph)
  
• WFPC2 (The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2)

• Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam)
  
• Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI)
  
• Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec)
  
• Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS)

Yes, there are things that Hubble can do that no other satellites can do, but not for the reasons you listed.

Hubble is one of multiple telescopes in NASA's Great Observatories project.

There are currently three space-bound observatories for astronomy.
For instance, Spitzer meets the qualifications you gave, the difference being that it operates in the IR range, while Chandra looks at x-rays.

Hubble works in the visible range. But that's not to say that it's the only space-based visible spectrum satellite, as there's also SOHO, which points at the sun, and isn't used to point anywhere but the sun.

[I'm not an astronomer, but I work on the STEREO and VSO projects]

While the second part of this statement has some truth, the first part of this statement is completely false. Adaptive Optics on ground-based optical telescopes are just barely starting to get in the same ballpark as HST, when it comes to resolution. You have diffraction-limited imaging on HST, which gives you a resolution of 0.05 arcseconds (see here). I have NEVER heard of anyone getting better than 0.3 arcseconds from the ground (and rarely even anything approaching that). Moreover, optical interferometry has NOT been shown to work reliably in any sort of consistant way. I think they've managed to get two of the telescopes of the VLT to work as an interferromerter in a very clunky way, but nothing NEAR what would be necessary for regular users.

That said, you're right to say that ground-based telescopes have some advantages: easier repaired, bigger mirrors (although this becomes less true with JWST), cheaper.

But, as the parent notes, space-based telescopes also are able to observe at wavelengths normally blocked by the atmosphere.

To get gravitational lensing, one has to have a sufficient integrated density along the line of sight. It is fair to surmise that looking "down the pipe" of a filament might produce enough integrated density to produce lensing, but it is not a necessary consequence.

I haven't heard of any lensing based on filament structures, but the folks who do what is called "weak lensing" might have some statistical arguments that can correlate their results with the likely (or unlikely) presence of filaments.

The main result I remember associated with filaments is the apparent clumpiness of the galaxy distribution on small scales. If you've got a lot of linear structures where galaxies form, then you get more super-positions of galaxies than would occur in a random distribution. Such arguments can explain the over-numerous of Hickson Compact Groups of Galaxies.

For those who would like to know what a "filament" might look like, you can see my visualization of large scale structure in the universe called "Cosmic Cruising 2" at http://terpsichore.stsci.edu/~summers/viz/cosmic_c ruising_2/. Please note that this visualization is not from observed galaxy data, but rather from a supercomputer simulation that has roughly the same statistical properties as the real universe.

Briefly, there's ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys), which does both optical and UV imaging; WFPC2 (Wide Field Planetary Camera 2), the older UV/optical imager; and NICMOS, which does near-infrared imaging. Both ACS and NICMOS also have spectroscopy modes, though they don't make up for what STIS does, or did.

Briefly, there's ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys), which does both optical and UV imaging; WFPC2 (Wide Field Planetary Camera 2), the older UV/optical imager; and NICMOS, which does near-infrared imaging. Both ACS and NICMOS also have spectroscopy modes, though they don't make up for what STIS does, or did.

I'm no astrophysicist, but yeah, it would be "loud enough" for us to see. It has an extremely sharp and "hot" energy signature. Quite distinctive. Even a low level would blaze above the cosmic background if you look at the specific frequency.

About the only way we could miss it would be if we we so "deep inside a matter boundry" that in every direction the boundary was outside the limit of the visible universe, some 15 billion or so light-year radius.

Assuming adjacent galaxies could be opposite doesn't really work. Not only is there is far too much contact through intergalactic gas, but galaxies collide with each other almost routinely. It is believed that essentialy all elliptical galaxies (about 10% of all galaxies) are the result of roughly equal mass galaxies colliding, and that many "normal" galaxies have collided-with/gobbled-up smaller galaxies and restabilized.

Here is a Hubble photo of actual colliding galaxies, and here is a really neat 7.3 meg MPG of a galaxy collision simulation.

Needless to say, it would be kinda hard to miss the fireworks from a matter-antimatter galaxy collision. It would likely be visible in broad daylight.

Even aside from the radiation signature, large scale regioning doesn't work either. If it were within the range of current galaxy mapping (some 7 billion light-years or so) we would see the exact opposie of what we do actually observe. Matter-antimatter anihilations would carry the mass-energy away from the border zones. The lower gravity in the buffer regions would produce "walls" of low-density vacuum surrounding blobs of gravitating mass. Instead the large-scall mapping projects show "walls" of mass surrounding bubble-voids.

To explain that better, the large-scale structure has been compared to a foam. The bubbles in the foam are voids in space in the foam-film is made up of galaxies. And like the soap film, the galaxies are essentially all linked together in sheets and walls rather than being surrounded by anihilation bubbles.

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• The WFC detector, called ACS/WFC, employs a mosaic of two 2048 × 4096 Scientific Imaging Technologies (SITe) CCDs, with ~0.05 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 202 × 202 arcsecond field of view (FOV), and a spectral response from~3700 to 11,000 Å.
• The HRC detector, called ACS/HRC, is a 1024 × 1024 SITe CCD, with ~0.028 × 0.025 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 29 × 26 arcsecond field of view, and spectral response from ~2000 to 11,000 Å.
• The SBC detector, called the ACS/SBC, is a solar-blind CsI Multi-Anode Microchannel Array (MAMA), with 1024 × 1024 ~0.034 × 0.030 arcsecond pixels, and a nominal 35 × 31 arcsecond FOV, with far-UV spectral response from 1150 to 1700Å.

• The WFC detector, called ACS/WFC, employs a mosaic of two 2048 × 4096 Scientific Imaging Technologies (SITe) CCDs, with ~0.05 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 202 × 202 arcsecond field of view (FOV), and a spectral response from~3700 to 11,000 Å.
• The HRC detector, called ACS/HRC, is a 1024 × 1024 SITe CCD, with ~0.028 × 0.025 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 29 × 26 arcsecond field of view, and spectral response from ~2000 to 11,000 Å.
• The SBC detector, called the ACS/SBC, is a solar-blind CsI Multi-Anode Microchannel Array (MAMA), with 1024 × 1024 ~0.034 × 0.030 arcsecond pixels, and a nominal 35 × 31 arcsecond FOV, with far-UV spectral response from 1150 to 1700Å.

• The WFC detector, called ACS/WFC, employs a mosaic of two 2048 × 4096 Scientific Imaging Technologies (SITe) CCDs, with ~0.05 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 202 × 202 arcsecond field of view (FOV), and a spectral response from~3700 to 11,000 Å.
• The HRC detector, called ACS/HRC, is a 1024 × 1024 SITe CCD, with ~0.028 × 0.025 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 29 × 26 arcsecond field of view, and spectral response from ~2000 to 11,000 Å.
• The SBC detector, called the ACS/SBC, is a solar-blind CsI Multi-Anode Microchannel Array (MAMA), with 1024 × 1024 ~0.034 × 0.030 arcsecond pixels, and a nominal 35 × 31 arcsecond FOV, with far-UV spectral response from 1150 to 1700Å.

• The WFC detector, called ACS/WFC, employs a mosaic of two 2048 × 4096 Scientific Imaging Technologies (SITe) CCDs, with ~0.05 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 202 × 202 arcsecond field of view (FOV), and a spectral response from~3700 to 11,000 Å.
• The HRC detector, called ACS/HRC, is a 1024 × 1024 SITe CCD, with ~0.028 × 0.025 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 29 × 26 arcsecond field of view, and spectral response from ~2000 to 11,000 Å.
• The SBC detector, called the ACS/SBC, is a solar-blind CsI Multi-Anode Microchannel Array (MAMA), with 1024 × 1024 ~0.034 × 0.030 arcsecond pixels, and a nominal 35 × 31 arcsecond FOV, with far-UV spectral response from 1150 to 1700Å.

• The WFC detector, called ACS/WFC, employs a mosaic of two 2048 × 4096 Scientific Imaging Technologies (SITe) CCDs, with ~0.05 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 202 × 202 arcsecond field of view (FOV), and a spectral response from~3700 to 11,000 Å.
• The HRC detector, called ACS/HRC, is a 1024 × 1024 SITe CCD, with ~0.028 × 0.025 arcsecond pixels, covering a nominal 29 × 26 arcsecond field of view, and spectral response from ~2000 to 11,000 Å.
• The SBC detector, called the ACS/SBC, is a solar-blind CsI Multi-Anode Microchannel Array (MAMA), with 1024 × 1024 ~0.034 × 0.030 arcsecond pixels, and a nominal 35 × 31 arcsecond FOV, with far-UV spectral response from 1150 to 1700Å.

In case anyone's interested and prefers a little more science in their science reporting, here's the original proposal (it's a text file):

http://www.stsci.edu/observing/phase2-public/9750. pro

A big aspect of this proposal *not* mentioned in the BBC article is the importance of metallicity on star formation - in other words, what star environments (old vs. young) form more planets.

For those who follow this field, I'll remind you of the OGLE project, which has been doing the same thing from the ground. They found 60 likely planetary candidates (out of a similar number of stars monitored), but only two of those actually look like they could be planets. All the rest are either grazing-incidence binaries or blended binaries. The higher resolution of Hubble may help the blend problem to an extent, but I highly doubt the number of actual planets is anywhere near 100.

They also have little chance of confirming whether these are actually planets, as you need to do extremely high-resolution spectroscopy in order to confirm its existence via the radial velocity method. Even Keck can only do that for stars down to ~16th magnitude, and according to the observing proposal, this survey is going down to 23rd. They might be able to get precise-enough light curves to reject false positives based on color-curve changes, but I'd like to see it before I believe it.

I think astronomers realize the importance of beauty when trying to get public support. Check out the Hubble Heritage project. The main reason for this project is to take pretty astronomy pictures.

I think astronomers realize the importance of beauty when trying to get public support. Check out the Hubble Heritage project. The main reason for this project is to take pretty astronomy pictures.

I have never been a big fan of Java, but that's just me. I think these toolkits are great because it is easy now to write crossplatform apps easily without having to use Java. And, go ahead and flame me, but I don't consider TK a usable interface for most modern day apps.

Perhaps this is introduced in the sensor, or in the instrument's optics. But a quick look around shows this type of noise in many HST images taken with different instruments. And it's not a type of noise I've learned to associate with a CCD type sensor.

I know if I made an optic that had noise like that, I'd likely hit the pitch lap again.

A final point is it's not like they are just going to shut ST down tomorrow (like they did IUE). Unless something bad happens, ST will be producing great science for years to come, we can only estimate its EOL.