Slashdot Mirror
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
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)
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
This particular camera actually does allow for prettier pictures, since its 16 million pixels of resolution looks nice even when printed poster size, and each pixel has great dynamic range and also responds to a nice wide range of wavelengths, allowing good "color" pictures to be taken.
They put up some other new instruments as well when they upgraded the Hubble, but the ACS, in addition to all the good science stuff it can do, is an excellent pretty-picture camera.
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
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)
dont see any scientific beauty there... I only see the beauty of Nature and the Universe..
Now how the light refracts off the lens... that is scientific beauty.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
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.
'Wallpaper' of these four photos has been generated and can be found on http://hubblesite.org .
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.
But you always hear people saying that looking into deep space is like looking through a time machine.
I think that what they're referring to is the fact that because the stars you can see are so far away it takes light emitted from them a very long time (think: millions of years for some...) to reach us; hence what we see when we look up at night at a particular star is the way that star looked millions of years ago, not the way it is now. For all we know it could well no longer exist - in that sense we're looking at the past.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Common Lisp!
You can find some of the details in this paper: COSI: Adding Constraints to the Object-Oriented Paradigm.
Cool stuff!!
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