Posted by
emmett
on from the mike-killed-the-hubble-mike-killed-the-hubble dept.
Rafael writes "The Hubble Space Telescope is back in business and better than ever, as made dramatically clear by stunning new pictures of remote galaxies and a colourful dying star. The story is at the BBC's webpage."
I like the way they chose 'photogenic' objects to photograph (good PR, I guess). Maybe it's time to have a slashdot poll on the most photogenic stellar objects? My vote: Uranus
I've always liked the sun reflecting off Saturn's rings.. Or binary star systems, complete with a matter cloud... I'd better stop before I change my wallpaper again..
Not vibrators, fully-functional blow-up dolls. Or Al Gore. I can see the campaign slogan now!
Al Gore in 2000! He's the plastic pal that's fun to be with! And Al's made from a 100% biodegradable, corn starch-enriched 4 mil polymer that not only will stand up to the tough job of President, but can be tossed in the landfill of your choice after his term! Try doing that with Bill Bradley! Coming soon! The Tipper Gore 'IQ transplant' kit! Replace the useless hot air she has in her head with 100% pure, processed American cheese food! Watch her drop her crusade for music censorship!
-- .sig: Now legally binding!
Better resolution images.
by
matthewsim
·
· Score: 4
A well erned victory for NASA! With all the poor press NASA has received lately with the Mars programs, it's nice to see a victory.
"Thanks to the great work by the astronauts, Hubble is better than new,"
Not only did they correct the gyro problems which made pointing a little difficult, the continued efforts on correcting the optics making them better than ever.
"After a two-month hiatus, it is a tremendous boost to all of astronomy to see Hubble back in action. Nasa has restored the observatory to a condition that was better than it was even before the fourth gyroscope failed."
Bigger and better (well, mostly bigger) versions of the images can be found here and here
I always love pictures from Hubble; they are always stunningly beautiful. However, they tend to look almost *too* good, as if some graphics artist had a bit to much free time while fiddling about with The GIMP... I sometimes think the Hubble folks are trying to pull a fast one on us with these pictures:)
Heh heh heh. There _is_ some subjectivity ("artistic interpretation") that goes on... but not with any intent to mislead, just in the attempt to give the best picture. What you get from Hubble is just a CCD readout -- that is, for each filter in which you take an image, you get (roughly speaking) a number of photons for each pixel. So the image, when you look at it, is greyscale, not spiffy reds and greens and blues.
To get a color picture, you basically pick a color to go along with each filter image -- these are pretty sensible (usually), but there's still a bit of leeway. Conventional choices might be, for instance, H-alpha (H transition, at 6563 A) as red , H-beta (4861) as blue, and maybe [OIII] 5007 as green. But depending on what you wanted to show, you might choose different color-wavelength correspondences.
Also, most of the images you see in PR releases and such have probably gone through additional processes to make them look nice -- ie gaussian smoothing filters, hand-removal of pesky lingering cosmic rays, subtle implantation of subliminal messages ("hubble good. nasa good."), whatever. It's all in good fun.
I think you need to get out more and appreciate how stunningly beautiful nature actually is.:}
Seriously, though, when we do analysis, a large part of the work can be considered a form of image enhancement or image manipulation. You might spend two hours or two nights on the actual observing, and two months (or much more) on the data reduction. That tedious work makes a big difference in how good your images will be for use in actual analysis and publication, or, alternatively, how good the pretty John Q. Public version of them will look on a webpage (cummulative with, but largely independent of the quality of the actual observation). (Ah, I C while I was typing someone mentioned a few of those things that go on in optical and other regimes; I'll skip things related to that.)
Your point jogs my memory on something about NASA graphics people, tho. ("They're goood...real goood.") When I visited a digital video lab at the JPL last year or so, they showed an S-VHS of a nice fly-by of the LA basin (centered around JPL site, and sans human structures). It was about 30 sec, in 24-bit and some ridiculous 3D res, making it some 2.5 GB.
Not impressed? It was made in _1982_. On a 286 speed equivalent machine. It took five days to render. And it was stunningly beautiful. Just (aside from you guys who actually _know_) imagine what they're doing now.
Fun, fun
K
Hidden Agendas
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5
Yet another hubble story. Hmmm. I'm astonished by the amount of people who are ignorant of the purpose of the telescope. Yeah, sure, everyone looks at the pretty pictures and says "yay! space is fun!" or "we can learn sooooo much!!!" without ever taking a peek at the real picture.
This is sad and ironic given that looking to space is supposed to focus our perspective on earth. Sigh.
But even this is not the true mission of the Hubble Space Telescope. I work for one of NASA's Hubble teams, so I am privy to certain documents that aren't released to the public. Ordinarily I'd withhold this information, but I think it's time for certain facts to come to light. Many people discounted the telescope due to the gyroscope failure, but failed to understand the gravity of the situation (pun intended . . . I work for the government, remember?).
The Hubble Space Telescope exists to find signs of cheese in other celestial bodies, be they star system or stars themselves. The grand lunar cheese expeditions were a phenominal disaster due to the total lack of cheese on the moon, as had been previously believed. Subsequent missions were sent after the initial to see if maybe they were just looking in the wrong place.
We've found that they WERE. The Mars lander was covered up because no cheese was found there either (which we knew, but it never hurts to double check).
The way the Hubble works is by looking at major cheese centers on earth, and analyzing the various waves emitted by cheese (dubbed "dairyons"), and then points out towards space to see if it can match with any dairyon centers in space, so we know which direction to fire the next probes. It is believed that in 15 years we will have a vessel capable of retreiving any cheese we can locate now.
NASA has come under alot of flack lately for various "failures". Yet we long ago forsaw the imminent cheese-shortage that Earth will face within the next 7-10 years. We've been doing all we can to locate external cheese supplies to harvest. I hope you all understand and do what you can to support projects like the Hubble, even if you are doing it just to look at the pretty pictures.
Forgive my sloppy prose. I'm a rocket scientist, not a writer.
BTW, HST is not purely American. At least one of the instruments on board is German made/operated, and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore is run by a consortium that consists of NASA, The Assoc. of University Researchers in America (AURA) and the European Space Agengy (ESA). Quite of little bit of its current funding comes from non-US sources.
I haven't found any sites that sell pictures yet (trying to answer my own question), but I did find the site with a nice 6+ meg file (and smaller versions) of the cool photo on the top of the BBC article. I suppose if you have a nice RGB printer you could print it out nicely. Somebody want to loan me a fujix photo printer.
Try this link. Where it says "Select Product Categories" at the top, pop open the combo box and select "Hubble Space Telescope". I'm sure there are others; if you e-mail me, I can probably track down some more for you.
-- Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
NASA's Press Release on This
by
pridkett
·
· Score: 3
Re:What's up with that /. department name?
by
technos
·
· Score: 4
In one episode of MST3000, Mike manages to destroy the Hubble. Hence: 'mike-killed-the-hubble' I think the robots were chanting something to that effect as well.
-- .sig: Now legally binding!
Re:This is getting out of hand
by
zantispam
·
· Score: 3
The gyros [snip] were flawed designs however.
Actually, (IIRC) the gyros were designed to last for a period of time x. They lasted something like x+6months. These were the water-filled gyros.
The new gyros are gel-filled and designed to last a period of time x^3.
So, as far as designs go, the gyros weren't flawed, they just lasted as long as the materials dictated that they would. Now that we have better materials, we can make better gyros. Dig?
censorship is a form of noise,
which actively seeks to drown out
content with silence - Crash Culligan
Re:This is getting out of hand
by
mattorb
·
· Score: 5
I really hope you're kidding. For my money, the Hubble is one of the best scientific investments we've _ever_ made -- it's absolutely unreal how much it has furthered astronomy and astrophysics in the years since it went up. The pretty pictures are great, sure -- they are beautiful, and beauty is I think something that any civilization discounts at its own peril. But there has also been a lot of pretty hard-core science from the Hubble -- witness the HST Key Project, which used the Hubble to observe remote Cepheids and calibrate the astronomical distance scale. Knowing the distance to all the objects in our Universe (and hence how old the light we're seeing is, how old our Universe is, etc.) is a pretty big deal, don't you think? The Hubble has also let us see, in far more detail than was possible before, the process of star formation itself -- think of the Eagle Nebula pictures, the so-called "pillars of creation." It's cool stuff.
Sorry if I'm ranting a bit here. My point is just this: if you want to rave about waste in our government, there are plenty of other places to look. Sure, the Hubble has had problems. Some of them have been stupid problems. But at maybe 6 billion dollars spent so far (the initial expenditure was quite a bit bigger than you quote, but I believe the shuttle flights cost less), it's been a bargain. And yes, I mean that seriously.:-)
Re:This is getting out of hand
by
DHartung
·
· Score: 5
Correction: One mission to fix the Hubble; two missions to upgrade it.
The Hubble was designed from the very beginning, in the early 70s, to be upgraded and serviced by the shuttle. While it was extremely unfortunate that the mirror flaw was not detected before it was on orbit, Hubble was able to do useful science even then; and after the fix it's performed superbly.
The gyros were expected to wear out, just maybe not so fast. The only real problem that's resulted was a bit of downtime, since the shuttle fleet was grounded for safety reasons last year (representing excellent quality control on the part of the shuttle teams); that wasn't Hubble's fault, though, and it went into safe mode as designed.
Estimating shuttle costs is an art, not a science, depending on how you include extraneous costs. Most people call a shuttle mission budget about HALF a $billion. Probably this is 5 to 10 times the cost that was expected during the Hubble design phase, but we're also flying the shuttle much less than expected -- which has nothing to do with Hubble.
I have no love for NASA; read _The Hubble Wars_ and you'll understand how the policitians and engineers took places in line before the scientists on this project far too many times. But in the end it's been a (qualified) success in so many ways.
In short, Hubble wasn't any more "broken" than your car is when you take it to Midas for new brake shoes. ----
-- lake effect weblog {Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Re:What's up with that /. department name?
by
technos
·
· Score: 2
You're right.. I realized seconds after clicking 'Submit' that it was the movie.. Then again, I'm not a 'die-hard' MST fan, so the mistake isn't going to kill me.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the way they chose 'photogenic' objects to photograph (good PR, I guess). Maybe it's time to have a slashdot poll on the most photogenic stellar objects? My vote: Uranus
There are some higher resolution images on NASA's website.
"Thanks to the great work by the astronauts, Hubble is better than new,"
Not only did they correct the gyro problems which made pointing a little difficult, the continued efforts on correcting the optics making them better than ever.
"After a two-month hiatus, it is a tremendous boost to all of astronomy to see Hubble back in action. Nasa has restored the observatory to a condition that was better than it was even before the fourth gyroscope failed."
Hats off to NASA!
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Bigger and better (well, mostly bigger) versions of the images can be found here and here
... I sometimes think the Hubble folks are trying to pull a fast one on us with these pictures :)
I always love pictures from Hubble; they are always stunningly beautiful. However, they tend to look almost *too* good, as if some graphics artist had a bit to much free time while fiddling about with The GIMP
Yet another hubble story. Hmmm. I'm astonished by the amount of people who are ignorant of the purpose of the telescope. Yeah, sure, everyone looks at the pretty pictures and says "yay! space is fun!" or "we can learn sooooo much!!!" without ever taking a peek at the real picture.
This is sad and ironic given that looking to space is supposed to focus our perspective on earth. Sigh.
But even this is not the true mission of the Hubble Space Telescope. I work for one of NASA's Hubble teams, so I am privy to certain documents that aren't released to the public. Ordinarily I'd withhold this information, but I think it's time for certain facts to come to light. Many people discounted the telescope due to the gyroscope failure, but failed to understand the gravity of the situation (pun intended . . . I work for the government, remember?).
The Hubble Space Telescope exists to find signs of cheese in other celestial bodies, be they star system or stars themselves. The grand lunar cheese expeditions were a phenominal disaster due to the total lack of cheese on the moon, as had been previously believed. Subsequent missions were sent after the initial to see if maybe they were just looking in the wrong place.
We've found that they WERE. The Mars lander was covered up because no cheese was found there either (which we knew, but it never hurts to double check).
The way the Hubble works is by looking at major cheese centers on earth, and analyzing the various waves emitted by cheese (dubbed "dairyons"), and then points out towards space to see if it can match with any dairyon centers in space, so we know which direction to fire the next probes. It is believed that in 15 years we will have a vessel capable of retreiving any cheese we can locate now.
NASA has come under alot of flack lately for various "failures". Yet we long ago forsaw the imminent cheese-shortage that Earth will face within the next 7-10 years. We've been doing all we can to locate external cheese supplies to harvest. I hope you all understand and do what you can to support projects like the Hubble, even if you are doing it just to look at the pretty pictures.
Forgive my sloppy prose. I'm a rocket scientist, not a writer.
Actually, the picture shown was in the Washington Post and the NY Times morning editions on 1/24.
You can also check STScI's Website for the latest news.
BTW, HST is not purely American. At least one of the instruments on board is German made/operated, and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore is run by a consortium that consists of NASA, The Assoc. of University Researchers in America (AURA) and the European Space Agengy (ESA). Quite of little bit of its current funding comes from non-US sources.
J.
I can see it now:
"Fsck! The new gyros aren't working!"
- "That's okay, I downloaded this program called
Povray on Friday."
Expect to see the discovery of the Teapot Nebula
any day now.
K.
-
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Here's the URL: http://oposite.stsci.edu
Here are the spots you can see the big images over at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
First, the Eskimo Nebula. And Abell 2218. Both sets of images are really really pretty.
You go hang out in Lower Earth Orbit for a decade and see how you turn out.
Solar panels tend to wear out when they are exposed to extreme temprature variations and cosmic radiation.
The gyros and the mirrors were flawed designs however.
Try this link. Where it says "Select Product Categories" at the top, pop open the combo box and select "Hubble Space Telescope". I'm sure there are others; if you e-mail me, I can probably track down some more for you.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
You can see NASA's press release on this at http://hubble.nasa.gov/updates/1- 24-00update.html
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
In one episode of MST3000, Mike manages to destroy the Hubble. Hence: 'mike-killed-the-hubble' I think the robots were chanting something to that effect as well.
.sig: Now legally binding!
The gyros [snip] were flawed designs however.
Actually, (IIRC) the gyros were designed to last for a period of time x. They lasted something like x+6months. These were the water-filled gyros.
The new gyros are gel-filled and designed to last a period of time x^3.
So, as far as designs go, the gyros weren't flawed, they just lasted as long as the materials dictated that they would. Now that we have better materials, we can make better gyros. Dig?
Now the mirror is a different story entirely....
Here's my copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
Sorry if I'm ranting a bit here. My point is just this: if you want to rave about waste in our government, there are plenty of other places to look. Sure, the Hubble has had problems. Some of them have been stupid problems. But at maybe 6 billion dollars spent so far (the initial expenditure was quite a bit bigger than you quote, but I believe the shuttle flights cost less), it's been a bargain. And yes, I mean that seriously. :-)
Correction: One mission to fix the Hubble; two missions to upgrade it.
The Hubble was designed from the very beginning, in the early 70s, to be upgraded and serviced by the shuttle. While it was extremely unfortunate that the mirror flaw was not detected before it was on orbit, Hubble was able to do useful science even then; and after the fix it's performed superbly.
The gyros were expected to wear out, just maybe not so fast. The only real problem that's resulted was a bit of downtime, since the shuttle fleet was grounded for safety reasons last year (representing excellent quality control on the part of the shuttle teams); that wasn't Hubble's fault, though, and it went into safe mode as designed.
Estimating shuttle costs is an art, not a science, depending on how you include extraneous costs. Most people call a shuttle mission budget about HALF a $billion. Probably this is 5 to 10 times the cost that was expected during the Hubble design phase, but we're also flying the shuttle much less than expected -- which has nothing to do with Hubble.
I have no love for NASA; read _The Hubble Wars_ and you'll understand how the policitians and engineers took places in line before the scientists on this project far too many times. But in the end it's been a (qualified) success in so many ways.
In short, Hubble wasn't any more "broken" than your car is when you take it to Midas for new brake shoes.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
You're right.. I realized seconds after clicking 'Submit' that it was the movie.. Then again, I'm not a 'die-hard' MST fan, so the mistake isn't going to kill me.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Glorious, colorful DEATH!
Of a star, I mean.
**>>BELCH