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Hubble's Upgrade: Pretty Pictures
EReidJ writes "The Hubble Space Telescope has come out with astonishing new pictures, our "deepest glimpse[s] into the depths of space and time". An article on the photos is here. These are striking in their beauty, and are sure to become commonplace desktop images in the next month. The official site to view all of the photos is here, but the site's already going pretty slow. washingtonpost.com has the four photos in series on its home page." There are also stories on space.com and MSNBC.
Neat! Also noteworthy is apod, Astronomy Picture of the Day, which also has a brief explanation of all the stuff they post. Of course, most of those pictures are as much a work of human art as photos, since few of the pictures are made of stuff in the visible spectrum, so all those vibrant colours are quite fake. Still looks nice, though. :)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Does anyone else just feel absolutely tiny when they find thousands of entire galaxies in a small patch of the sky? Galaxies contain billions of stars, and God knows how many planets... Kinda makes the silly things we argue about here on slashdot seem just that- silly.
Just a thought.
This from a caption of one of the pictures "Surprisingly, about 6,000 newly spotted galaxies are in the background of this image."
OK the universe is bigger than I thought
Free cell phone tracking
This is a great example of the astonishing beauty in science!
when nothing brainy to say, say something nice
Some of those space shots make incredible backgrounds. Eiher straight up or thorow them in photoshop and filter it a bit, maybe a nice blurr or somthing. I am sure your attention spands are shot so ill sign off...
-----
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Go here... Ill get as many as i can, these are sweet :)
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
http://www.msnbc.com/c/0/77/999/ssMain.asp?fmt=Chi ld&0ss=N%r0077999
It's going pretty fast still, and MSNBC did a serious upgrade for the Olympics, so I doubt it will get Slashdotted.
modern choral music...
Unfortunately space.com's "universal viewer" didn't work too well with Konqueror (javascript problems?) - but that tadpole galaxy picture is amazing! And 10 times
faster than the old camera, so they can do one of these every day?!
Energy: time to change the picture.
I'm wondering if the space.com photo of "the mice" galaxies is the right picture.
Looks a lot like a cut from a film I watched in health class in the 6th grade.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
BBC has it too, with pictures.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Sadly, despite the continuing stream of succesful discoveries and experiments (not to mention missions in space!), NASA continues to suffer from a lack of funding. Even when NASA saves our asses once again, they must struggle to get the money they deserve.
I think we all must ask ourselves what are priorities are. Are we going to forego all of the useful functions of Society, including welfare, affirmative action, and the right for a Woman to Choose, just so we can look at these pretty pictures? Is taxing the hell out of science fiction fans (previous slashdot story, can't seem to find it, sorry) worth satisfying our silly human curiosity?
Well, curiosity it is that has driven all of the advances of Mankind, from the earliest primitive tools to the Crucifiction of Jesus to the Constitution of the United States. Human ingenuity has always triumphed. And this case is no different.
You know what choice to make...we all do. Generations from now, our descendents will remember Earth, the USA, and NASA, where it all started. They will be thankful. And that is the greatest reward I could ever wish for.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Does the new camera really allow astronomers to take pretty pictures that they couldn't take before, or are they just using pretty pictures as a public relations gimmick? I imagine that it's possible that a camera that was better for scientists wouldn't necessarily make the pictures prettier. "Prettier" could be accomplished with false colorings and other cheap tricks.
Any of you astrophysics types out there, can you help me with this? Do you think that the whole concept of dark matter is in a lot more danger now that billions of new galaxy's will come to light? This seriously must tip the size and weight of the universe.
It also makes all problems here on earth seem so petty and insignificant compared to the grand scheme of things.
Quote from the article: We will be able to enter the 'twilight zone' period when galaxies were just beginning to form out of the blackness following the cooling of the universe from the big bang.
It sounds like perhaps we are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!
The pictures are also available on Yahoo, which I'd bet will be able to handle a slashdotting.
Here they are.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
I know the ultraviolet explorer and NICMOS systems use false color imaging, as does LandSat.
Best Slashdot Co
The advantage Hubble has over ground based telescopes with much larger lenses is that is does not have to cope with the distorsion caused by the atmosphere.
I have heard, however, that we now have mathematical models of those atmospheric distorsions that are so accurate that soon ground-based telescopes will regain the "lead". Could somebody with more knowledge confirm/elaborate ?
DZM
"Wish you were here!"
If all continues to go well, the camera will also spend some time on an improbable quest to take the first picture of a planet outside our solar system.
I don't think that HST is going to be the first telescope to successfully image an extrasolar planet. It's magnification and capabilities are just barely at the point where it would be able to spot one. I think the first telescope to image an extrasolar planet will be SIM (Space Interferometry Mission), which is currently slated to go up some time around 2009. It uses optical interferometry to gain tremendous increase in magnification and precision. It will be ~100,000x more precise than HST with an accuracy of 1-4 Microarcseconds. Of course, it is made to have a very small field of view so it won't make HST or other medium to wide field of view scopes obsolete. But I can't wait to find some of the results that come out of that project.
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
"The Advanced Camera for Surveys has twice the resolution, or sharpness, of the WFPC-2 and five times the sensitivity. It is built around an ultra-sensitive 16-million-pixel detector array that dwarfs the chips found in consumer digital cameras."
(I like if's.) If galaxies are now able to be seen by us because of such higer resolution, what would happen if we point the Hubble at something closer? Could we see the surface of Pluto? Would we just not be able to focus? Or can we only see things that emit light?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
The official site to view all of the photos is slashdotted, but for once, we didn't do it.
Does anyone know where we can get posters of these images from? I would like some for my classroom.
"deepest glimpse[s] into the depths of space and time"
How can the Hubble do that? Unless it was some kind of audio-vibratory-physio-molecular transport device....
NASA is an industrial subsidy in disguise. At least that's what this article from The Onion says.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
There is a TIFF version which I didn't opt to download (too big), but here is one of the full size images in jpg format. It's 3690x3743. I grabbed this one from the official web site earlier today. I, like others no doubt, can't get there now, so I figured others might like a way to get at at least one full rez picture....
--- What?
This will get us by until the Hubble Heritage Site gets ahold of them or the main site becomes un-/.ed.
Hubble, even with its previous camera, was able to take quite nice pictures of solar system objects. However, they still don't--and even with the new optics, won't--measure up to what we get when we actually send spacecraft there, so the telescope is not used for that very much. The only planet we haven't at least flown by with a spacecraft is Pluto, and even the upgraded Hubble won't be able to show us much (just the very largest features, if there are any) there.
Consider this:
Homo Sapiens has been running around for roughly 200,000 years.
We've had the ability to reach space for roughly 50 years.
We've been able to fly for about 100 years - incidently, we visited all the places on the planet at about the same time.
The first demonstration of the incandescent light bulb was roughly 120 years ago.
The first steam engine was 220 years ago.
The entire North American continent was unknown to Europeans 600 years ago.
The earliest known forms of writing date to about 5500 years ago.
Not only are we small, we're brief too.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
These are absolutely beautiful. I was floored just looking at them.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Check this animations:
m at ion.html
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2002/11/ani
Right now I'm watching my new desktop image of the tadpole galaxy. And like another poster said, it is amazing and scary to watch all those other galaxies in the background of that image.
If the universe has no central point of expansion, one cannot guage an objects age from distance. But you always hear people saying that looking into deep space is like looking through a time machine. I just don't understand this.
/younger/ than
The stars in the background could be
the ones in the foreground.
Or maybe I'm just confused.
The universe came from a big bong? That explains all those cloud like pictures, I thought they were nebulas this whole time.
Anyone have sources for even higher resolution pics like these? They don't fill up the desktop too well. Will they eventually release them?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford is a sense of proportion.
-- from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
It's in my pants!!!
Seriously, the examination of the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe is staggering. Humanity may never have the opportunity to leave our own galaxy because of it... but what if that energy was something that could be tapped?
Heady thoughts for a little mind...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
When you look at things 5 or 10 billion light years away, you see them as they were 5 or 10 billion years ago. So, the depths of time. The deep field images confirm what the Big Bang theory predicts: the universe was quite different 10 billion years ago. It had lots of little hydrogen rich galaxies packed close together, instead of the fewer, larger, and more spread out galaxies we see around here now.
you mean last eon.
Its nice to see that every once and a while the millions and millions of dollars that the american government pours into the space project does provide us with great results
With the new advent of space-tourests speding $20 mil to get into space (with russia), the idea of science and research in space is getting put in the back seat. An example of this is when both of the tourists went into space i saw them on the news, but as of yet today i have not heard a peep about this (on the headlines).
Hopefully as more and more people look at space to answers more and more questions , it wont remain a area that is of lesser inportance to popular opinion
Medevo
seems to work fine in konqueror 3.
Liberty.
Is this the real colours that we would see with our eyes, or have they been enhanced by processing?
This NASA story, Hubble's New Camera Delivers Breathtaking Views Of The Universe, has links to the photos. One of the linked sites, Hubblesite.org has stories such as Hubble's Advanced Camera Unveils a Panoramic New View of the Universe, which has thumbnail photos.
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ice_fire/hubble.htm
I don't feel tiny at all. I am, and that is all that matters. Te me, at least.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Wow! Look at this, from the bottom of the second column of Ralph's site:
"NOTE: Consulting and Open Source Programming rates range between 400$ and 1200$ per hour. Serious inqueries only, please."
Obligatory Python lyric:
(spoken)
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
(sung)
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
(waltz)
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Before we can read the license plate on somebodies car, on some planet, in the andromeda galaxy. It would be like "Enemy of the State" except all we would have a hard time getting the agents over there to chase people around.
Could someone please explain the extent to which space imagery in general (and particularly today's stunning hubble images) is altered by artists? I'm of the understanding that the original image was not actually of visible light, due to the doppler shift, and therefore the color image is "constructed" from an uglier image.
Is there some science to "unshifting" the colors such that the colors in the picture are "correct", or are they just picked on a whim by an artist?
Also the sharply pointed glare/lensfx spikes around the bright stars look like they are faked-in as well to me... Were they artistically added, were they artifacts of the original camera, or does it "really" look that way?
I'd appreciate these stories (i.e. Washington Post article) more if they would be mroe direct with the public about how much is "real" and how much is pure art. I'm sure 99% of their viewers (sheep) believe these are direct camera snapshots of the universe and nobody is telling them any different.
11*43+456^2
but the new ACS camera is yummie for astronomers. It gives deeper images, more pixels , schaper view, etc.
These are good times to be an astronomer... :)
Nice advert free gallery of the photos available from WashingtonPost.com. Nice and big too.
Click for Gallery
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Recipe for a fun-filled weekend of nihilistic fun:
Astromony and psychedelics go together like peantut butter & jelly, I tell you whut. I have done this a few times, and it's the only time in my life I've come close to having a religious experience.
If Seti@Home did actually find anything, do you actually think that the 'powers that be' would let the general public know about it? If the findings of the Brookings Report are being considered, the answer is an unequivocal "no".
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Yes, everyone agrees Hubble is valuable. Hubble's upgrade bears proof that someone in charge of the pusrstrings thinks it is important. So whats your point?
No matter what we do, the universe is either going to die a cold death where nothing can survive, or contract onto itself and undergo another big bang. So, nothing you do will be recorded forever.
Unless, of course we undertake a massive project with our universe coinhabitants to alter the local density of a region of space so we can all survive a cold death. (see Contact, the *book*)
Study science.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As the Matrix lady says, that oughtta really bake your noodle.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
the same way most military actions help, restriction of population growth
Common Lisp!
You can find some of the details in this paper: COSI: Adding Constraints to the Object-Oriented Paradigm.
Cool stuff!!
Hey, screw you moderator. I am not trying to troll. I think I make a pretty valid point. But I guess anything that opposes what is popular among the /. community will be burned to the ground. Is that what /. is? A popularity forum. That's right, popularity effects everything. And I think people who make claims about deep space astronomy past what they can actually see and call them the truth are hacks. But it is not popular here to disagree with published science.
So screw you, calling this a troll when it is mearly a different way of looking at it is biased. The least you could have done was call it off topic which you may have been able to defend!
They are no more real than the lens-flare that's added to poorly designed computer games that attempt to make it seem like you're there by adding something you'd only see if you weren't there and were actually viewing the action via a camera. Irony, eh?
I'm sure I speak for more than a few of those of us here when I say that lens flare, etc are things that I, as a glasses-wearing non-20/20-vision-capable person, experience on a regular basis. d:
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
That puts things into perspective nicely. Thanks for the factoids. Makes you stop and think...
I managed to grab all four in JPG format. Not in the highest resolution, but the middle. I have no place to host them but would be happy to upload to someone who has bandwidth to spare ...
It might just be a good idea to fix problems here at home first before we venture out into space. Hundreds of murders, robberies, rapes, suicides, terrorist activities, etc. are performed each year and yet we are worried about the remote possiblity that an asteroid *might* hit the earth 3000 years from now.
Fix the problems *here* and *now* and only after those are solved should we go out into space. If those problems never get solved so be it.
As someone once said, we keep looking for intelligent life "out there" but yet we haven't quite found it here. Let's get our priorities straight.
Greatest reward i could wish for is that we stop pretending to be God by deciding who lives and who dies and stop the abortionists, the suicide bombers, the homicide bombers, the terrorists, the rapists, the child molesters, the wife beaters, the embezzlers, the extortionists and anyone else who likes to think that absolute morals don't matter and after all that is accomplished God says "thank you, finally".
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
On the other hand, if inflation (that is, the universe expanding faster than the speed of light) has had as a significant effect on the size of the Universe as some would have us believe, the visible Universe is likely to just be a small bubble in a much larger physical Universe, since the light in it simply hasn't had time to travel all the way across it.
;)
As for the Universe wrapping around, well, yeah; what else is it going to do? Ok, maybe it'll just reverse you when you cross the "boundary", and you end up going in the other direction with your left/right reversed (like what would happen if you were to flip through the 5th dimension) or something. Bah, how should I know
Psalm 19
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.
The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward.
Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.
Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.
Does this alter our current ideas about the age of the universe? If galaxies were at certain stages of evolution 13 billion years ago, then the universe must be even older than that, correct?
Last I heard, best guess was that the universe was ~10 billion years old. Will the updated Hubble now drastically change that figure?
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Fullscreen mode with MSIE then surf around with the middle mouse button clicked in its really freaky like flying around in space ^_^
"If sometimes you feel yourself little, useless, offended and depressed, always remember that you were once the fastest and most victorious sperm out of hundreds of millions".
...I miss Doug Adams. Before You reincarnate Your Son, as You do at the end of time, please bring back Doug, at least so we can stick him for the last round.
Looks like his daughter is a good place to start getting tough on crime. (Funny, I just can't see it happening).
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
The third one (Mice Galaxies) looks an awful lot like a Jedi with a lightsabre to me. This close to the release of the next Star Wars movie, does this strike anyone else as a little odd?
;-P
I bet if we looked into this new Hubble funding we'd find George Lucas somewhere on the investor list.
As if faking the moon landings wasn't bad enough...
You are young... Life has been kind to you. You will learn...
Folks the conversation is a fallicious one...
We live at the middle of our ability to see and measure the universe. If we (just for grins and giggles) say our human existence, happens in around the scale of 1 meter (as in a human being is roughly 2 meters long, etc.) Then our ability to evaluate our universe, and place ourselves with respect to it's various features, is a function of our ability to see the ultimately grand and the remarkabley microcosmic.
If we guess that we can see out and back to about 13,000,000,000 light years, that's something on the order of 1.2 x 10^26 meters. By the same token we can look down at atoms with scanning tunneling electron microscopes (and indirectly measure objects as small as quarks, leptons (eg. electrons), and soon strings.) Our view of the extremely small is alost exactly the inverse scale of the extremely large. As our tools get better we see more and more. That is, our span of visibility grows (this will continue until we exhaust either our ingenuity or the limits of spacetime as they can be measured.)
The whole point to this convesation is that we live balanced on the edge of a razor, between the infinitely grand and infinitely miniscule. We are universes unto ourselves each and every one one of us, a complete univese from the scale of quarks. We are whole galaxies, each containing as many cells, as there are stars in the Milky Way. We are each a complete world, yet connected inseperably with the singular superorganism that dictates all living existence on this planet. We are as singular elementary particles in the face of the vastness that the visible univese is, and beyond the limits of the light that reaches us, there are likely endless universes, each an expanding bubble in the unfolding inflationary model of existence.
No perspective is invalid. You are at once, as great or insignificant as you choose to be, and the universe will be happy to give you the evidence to qualify your position. You are the smallest spect of nothing on a blue mote floating in an endless sea of eternal emptiness... be of good cheer, the mistakes you make will vanish in an instant, you are free to fail, and succed, as your heart desires, because none of it makes any difference in the unfolding of eternity anyway. On the other side, you are a god in your own universe, the source of making a difference, and you are accountable for the greatness you bring to this existence. Your life matters on the scale of life, and the difference you make is unique, and vital.
The wise soul learns to dance on the edge of the razor, and wrest from that dance both personal meaning, and the freedom to be fully, unbounded by the concerns of eternity.
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Sorry, it's not a "conspiracy theory". The Brookings Report is a *real* study that was conducted by the Brookings Institute at the request of the government.
Basically, what it concluded was that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be so profound that it would disrupt the structure of society as we know it, possibly resulting in its collapse. Because of this, any discoveries of this sort should not be disclosed to the general populace.
Now, am I saying that this has happened? No. You conveniently overlooked my use of the word "IF" in my post. I never said that this is definitively what is happening. I just said that IF the government chose to make the findings of that study a matter of policy, then, well, as a matter of course, they would cover up anything groundbreaking that Seti@Home found.
So much for your "conspiracy theory".
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
I think drugs assist in any form of science and mathematics. I remember I spent a month trying to understand the chaos theory in highschool. Then on a camping trip with some friends, after smoking the herb . . . . suddenly it all made sense. They couldn't shut me up about it for hours. And the best thing is that I remembered it all afterwards!
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.