Hubble's Infrared Camera Repaired

blamanj writes "Hubble's newly repaired Infrared Camera, has produced some interesting new pics, including a "golden band" at the galactic center that is 'churning out stars at a torrid pace.' NASA press release and images here."

Comments

Re:Hubble.....

[Fantanicity]

NASA false-color these images

Since it's an infra-red camera, yes.

Not our Galactic Center

[spaceling]

This slashdot post had me assuming that the galactic center being referred to was our own Milky Way's. It is not. The findings are not of our galactic center, but that of NGC 4013. "NGC 4013, which looks similar to our Milky Way Galaxy, resides in the constellation Ursa Major, 55 million light-years from Earth."

Re:Not our Galactic Center

[mgarraha]

NGC 4013 was also the subject of the Hubble Heritage image for March 2001. Here's a ground-based image from the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak. It's supposed to be visible in a 6-inch telescope. Next clear night I'll take a look.

Re:Nice pics

[PD]

How lucky we are to live in such times!

I agree that it's cool to be able to see more than anyone else, but it's not luck. It was a shitload of hard work, and the accumulated knowlege of all those people in history who never got to see these amazing things.

Luck implies random chance. I think it's not fair to call more hard work that either you or me can shake a stick at luck.

Oh, and by the way, I'm terminating my little experiment early. See my web page for details. To summarize, I was going to post 20 completely bogus posts with the goal of getting people to mod them up instead of down. It worked at first, but then the more clueful moderators came along after 2-3 days and modded the posts down. I wanted to see if I could stay above 45 karma, but was modded down to 42 after 8 posts. The conclusion is that Slashdot's moderation system does work, but not efficiently. It takes some time for the more considered moderations to kick in. After about 3 days a large part of the bogus information will be either responded to or modded down. But still, don't believe everything you read on the Internet!

Re: False Color

[Ethidium]

As stated in the article, red represents longer infrared wavelengths, and blue represents shorter ones. This corresponds exactly to what we would see if our eyes picked up the IR part of the spectrum, rather than the visible bit.

Nearly all of the cool astrophotographs that you'll see from Hubble and elsewhere are false-colored, because the visible spectrum is not any more useful than any of the other spectra (microwave, UV, and IR, to name a few), provided you have the proper equipment to capture all of them.

You can see more cool hubble pics (and other astrophotographs), and learn more about false-coloring of astrophotographs at the Astronomy Picture of the Day page.

Hydrogen Light

[mgarraha]

The red color of the bottom "hydrogen light" image looks like visible H-alpha emission at 656 nm, but it's the infrared Paschen-alpha line emitted at 1876 nm when an electron drops from level 4 to 3. Here's an easy explanation of the hydrogen spectrum.

Work vs. luck

[texchanchan]

Their hard work, your good luck (to get born now instead of in 1600 or 120,000 BC).

Re:Work vs. luck

[PD]

Am I really lucky though? I mean, I work so hard and somebody that I don't know is going to think I lost the lottery because I didn't get to see all the cool stuff that they can see.

So, am I lucky to be born now, or really unlucky that I'll never kiss a green chick like Captain Kirk?

This makes luck seem a little less lucky to me.

It wasn't broken, it wasn't fixed

[sigwinch]

It was upgraded. It was originally cooled using expendable solid nitrogen. Although the nitrogen did run out faster than planned, its limited lifetime was intentional. The new closed-cycle neon cooler is actually a major functional upgrade over the original design.