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

funding

[tps12]

Hubble pictures! I think we all like Hubble pictures. And why shouldn't we? Curiosity is one of those things that makes humans...human!

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.

Possibly stupid Question..

[Havokmon]

How does it all work?

"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?

Re:Amazing, and just a little scary...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and a good thought it is...have you ever read, "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan? Here is a relevant quote from that book:

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers
of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and
triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of
this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner,
how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one
another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined
self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the
Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light."

-- Carl Sagan

"...billions and billions and billions..."

-- Carl Sagan

Re:Could someone please explain?

[nagora]

I have not been able to read the site as it's down but looking at the images I'd guess that not much has been done other than to "unshift" where needed because of doppler. It's also fairly common for colour balance to be fiddled to bring out detail in images where there is low contrast and filtered to take out noise but I've never heard of a Hubble image being touched up by a live human artist. Publicity shots like these also tend to be chosen for their "real colouredness" as NASA feels people are turned off by being told that this is a view in the X-Ray spectrum.

So the answer to the question "how realistic is this?" is that if you had really good eyesight and were very close to these objects you would recognise them from these photos although they might sometimes seem less vibrant.

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?

The spikes are a common artifact of the cameras; a human eye would only see these if you had been crying or suffered from some form of eye trouble (poss astigmatism but I'm not sure). 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?

TWW

Think of it this way...

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

It may not be as big as it looks

[Jeremi]

I attended a talk at CalTech this weekend by Janna Levin (author of How the Universe got its Spots). Her theory is that the universe may "wrap around at the edges", a sort of 3-dimensional analogue to the old Asteroids paradigm... i.e. if you travel in a straight line long enough, you would arrive back at the point where you started. If this is in fact the case, then it's likely that many of those "thousands and thousands of galaxies" that the Hubble is seeing are, in fact, merely additional images of other galaxies, produced by light waves that are on their second (or third or fourth) trip "around" the universe. It's hard to detect the redundancy, however, since these additional images would show the galaxies at a much younger age, and thus they wouldn't look the same as the galaxies do "now" (errm... in their most direct image).

As the Matrix lady says, that oughtta really bake your noodle. :^)