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.

Comments

Nerd pr0n ;)

[moonbender]

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. :)

Mirror of Images

[Cybersonic]

Go here... Ill get as many as i can, these are sweet :)

Re:Possibly stupid Question..

[RobertFisher]

An object does not need to emit light in order to be seen by a telescope. Just as you can see terrestrial objects all around you which do not emit any significant amount of light in the visble because they reflect and scatter light from the sun, so too can a telescope see planets from reflected light from the sun.

The reason why distant planets, asteroids, and comets are so difficult to see is because they must first reflect light from the sun (going as 1 / r1^2, where r1 is the distance from the sun to the object) and then that reflected light must travel from the object to us (going as 1 / r2^2, where r2 is the distance from the object to us). That means the apparent luminosity scales as

1 / (r1^2 r2^2)

For objects in the outer solar system, r1 ~ r2, so the scaling goes as the inverse fourth power of the distance, as opposed to the usual inverse square law for directly emitted light. When you throw in the additional fact that many of those outer solar system objects like Pluto and Kuiper belt objects are extremely tiny in comparison to the giant planets, thereby reducing their reflecting power even more, you can see why it is difficult to see such distant objects.

I am not familiar with any Hubble observations of Pluto, though I am certain you could get an image if you gathered enough light for a long enough duration. Practically speaking, however, Hubble is primarily useful for getting excellent resolution not possible with ground-based telescopes due to atmospheric effects. Furthermore, it is in very high demand, so that it is only used where ground-based instruments cannot work as well. Ground-based telescopes are still much larger, and have a much greater light-gathering ability than Hubble, however, and are still the instruments of choice when every photon counts, as when astronomers gather specta.

Bob