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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. :)
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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...
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)
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)
There is a technology called active optics that can be applied to ground-based observations to 'clean up' the optical distortions (seeing) caused by the atmosphere.
Most research-grade telescopes these days are Cassegrain telescopes, which means they have two distinct mirrors, the big primary mirror (When you hear sizes of telescopes, they are making reference to the diameter of this mirror: Keck = 10M, UKIRT=4M, etc.), and the smaller secondary mirror which further focuses the beam from the primary into a tight beam suitable for an eyepiece or camera. Basically how active optics works is there are is an extra camera that picks up the wavefronts of the light as it comes through the atmosphere. It then flexes and bends the secondary mirror (much smaller than the primary) in slight ways in order to accomodate for the atmospheric distortions.
The results are drastic. Images that have been created using active optics are much clearer than non-AO images. However, AO is very expensive to use, and to some extent, degrades the quality of the image. Since some of the light is taken away from the original image as it is sent to the wavefront-detecting camera, it reduces the overall light-gathering power of the telescope. Thus, when a telescope is in AO mode, it creates clearer images, but it isn't as sensitive to deeper/fainter sources as when it isn't in AO mode.
I don't think that AO will make earth-based telescopes behave like Space-based ones, but it will indeed help earth-based telescopy to create better images.
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
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
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.
Adaptive/Active optics can work in two ways. One way is to use a bright (and it has to be damn bright) star near the target that one's hoping to look at. Then, by seeing how the atmosphere distorts this (supposedly point-source) star, we can adjust the mirror to compensate. There are different ways to do this that involve just moving the image around or re-shaping the mirror altogether, but I won't go into that here. The trouble with this plan is that it's hard to find a star bright enough in the part of the sky that you happen to be observing. It has to be damn bright, since you have to read out the CCD several times a second in order to compensate for the atmosphere fast enough. The second method uses a sodium-type laser that excites a layer in the atmosphere very high up (i.e. above most of the clouds/water vapor/crap). This behaves as a sort of artificial bright star that one can have anywhere in the sky.
The Center for Adaptive Optics (at UCSC) has a decent simple explanation here.
All of this aside, this will probably NOT render HST obsolete any time soon, since this is rediculously hard to do and has yet to really be done convincingly in any large-scale way, as people at my institution are finding out.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
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.
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
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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?
It's the density of matter in the universe that requires the existence of dark matter, not how many galaxies there are. Discovering more galaxies doesn't make any difference - we already know the visible-matter density of the universe.
Far more interesting is going to be using these pictures to work out whether the universe is full of "dark energy" which is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate.
We can't see dark energy (duuuh cos it's dark) but we can work out whether the universe is accelerating or not. It's all rather complicated, and relies on an accurate survey of the distances and speeds of very distant galaxies.
Speed is easy, that's measured from spectral red-shift. Distance is hard. Walmart don't make a tape measure 2 billion light years long, so we need a different method.
Recently, someone worked out a trick to measure the distance. Type 1 supernovae are all about the same brightness, and can be identified by their spectrum. So all we have to do is search for galaxies containing type 1 supernovae. Trouble is, you need to look at a lot of galaxies before you find a single supernova that happens to be going off at the time the photo is taken, and you need to look at a lot of supernovae before you can build up a good statistical picture.
In short, people have done this from Earth. Now they can do it from space with Hubble, looking at galaxies much further away and look at lots of them at once. Expect the controversy over whether or not the universe's expansion is accelerating to be resolved within the next 2 years.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!