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Hubble Catches Some Cosmic Fireworks
Roland Piquepaille writes "On this Fourth of July, it's usual -- at least in the U.S. -- to watch fireworks. But I want to invite you to see very special ones, celestial fireworks discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomy Magazine has the story. "In a newly released image, the Hubble Space Telescope peers into a neighboring galaxy to capture a gorgeous view of a supernova remnant called LMC N 49. Also known as DEM L 190, the nebula lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud approximately 160,000 light-years away." Read this summary for more details and a nice illustration from the Hubble Heritage Team. You can find additional tons of information at this Hubble Heritage Project page."
Check out this Hubble picture
Good thing they chose a non-technical name that would be easier to remember!
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They really shouldn't have tried to measure the mass of the Higgs boson.
I don't want to look at cute picture. I want to see the real one, in false color if the picture show something not in the visible spectrum with a scale saying what's the meaning of each color.
That headline so not scientific it doesn't belong on Slashdot. Clearly the image is the face of the Virgin Mary. The virgin faces towards the southwest corner of the picture, her hands clasped in prayer. Try to be a little more rational with your descriptions next time.
As a betelgeusean, I would like to lodge a complaint.
Slashdot is becoming waaaaaay too Milky way-centric
here is another cosmic firework captured by hubble.
I was looking at this phenomenon earlier today and found out what actually causes these things.
Apparently somewhere in our Universe subatomic particles are being created with huge amounts of kinetic energy, these sparks are sent flying between galaxies at near light speeds, and these fireworks are what you see before they cool down and become invisible to telescopes.
There is no god
Is Slashdot were European, it'd shutdown in the afternoon and several times a month for a holiday. Heck, it'd be down most of the summer, too.
Unless there is a reasonable chance of losing appendages.
and how is that different from the current state of affairs?
So what day is it everywhere else?
why does my star go "boom"?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
damn right, we know how to live.
Now go make more money for big strong leaders.
Next thing you know american kids'll be chanting the national anthem in school as part of the brainwashing.
Oh, wait...
The APOD also has a good picture of this today.
Maybe it's a massive advertising campaign for Adobe Illustrator?
I think watching fireworks on 4'th of july is usual ONLY in the U.S. Turn your eyes away from that belly and get real.
If you visit APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day) they link to a huge 7.2 megapixel version of this picture. So, unless your desktop is bigger than 2700x2700 anyone can scale it down and make a cool desktop from this.
This is another example of a trend in "astronomy" that I'm finding very irritating. From the article:
The color image was created from observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and superposed onto a black-and-white Hubble image of stars in the field.
Didja wonder why the picture looks straight out of "Star Trek"? Were the people who did ST a decade (or two) ahead of their times? Imbued with the ability to imagine realistic astronomical phenomena long before Hubble began to reveal them? Well lesseee... The image is created through "observations" from Hubble, the important part being the fact that they use plural form. So the colour portion of the pic is a composite from two or more pictures. The colours are so vibrant you have to assume they're retouched, and the stars in the background were added. In addition many of the stars have lens flares which would destroy any scientific value they had which means the lens flares were Photoshopped in afterward! I'm picking on this one example, there have been many "amazing Hubble pics" reported on recently that at best are heavily retouched and at worst border on fabrication. Do we have to win tax-payer support by drawing Star Trek scenes and releasing them to news outlets as "science"? Is this where CNN has taken us? No offense intended to the scientists who are using Hubble to expand our knowledge but I can do without the cheerleaders and P.R. schtick...
YHBT. HAND.
AC
click HERE for various resolutions of this image.
A particularly good one is here.
I dunno, maybe it's the caffeine or something...
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
- The colour portion of the pic is a composite from two or more pictures.
- The colours are so vibrant you have to assume they're retouched
- the stars in the background were added
- many of the stars have lens flares
... Photoshopped in afterward
The meat of your complaint seems to be this: Do we have to win tax-payer support by drawing Star Trek scenes and releasing them to news outlets as "science"? And that's a very valid question, even if, as I pointed out above, nothing really fishy is being done here.True, but this is always true: in order not to saturate detectors, and to remove the inevitable cosmic rays, it is typical to take lots of dithered exposures. For an example of just how serious this cosmic ray problem is, take a look at this before and after image pair.
True, they are assigned, but it is very typical to get images in multiple filters, each of which has a well defined "color" - so it is easy to produce a final representative color image. Not even stretching the truth that much.
Well, they retained the stars from one image (so they were not added), and rendered that in greyscale. Artistic license, definitely.
Alas, flaring is typical: if you have bright stars in the field, the mirror obstructions (supports, secondary, etc) will produce flares. True at every optical telescope, from Palomar and Keck to the HST. Definitely not Photoshop!
My point of view, should that interest you, is this: except for a couple of very rare exceptions, every target the HST looks at is chosen after a brutal (trust me, brutal) review process. The HST costs an enormous of money to run, and they have lived up to that in terms of published peer-reviewed output per observation. So now if they kick in a few thousand extra bucks to take the science images, combine them with a little (not much, mind) artistic license, and release it to the public (who are, after all, paying for it) -- more power to them! Astronomy is one of those rare disciplines where the the excitement of cutting edge science can still be brought to the casual reader - if nothing else, as "Ooh, look, a pretty picture!" I think that is well worth it, as long as they aren't being scientifically dishonest.
(And that last point is a whole other story: do press releases over-hype the discovery? Does Nature twist a simple research result into "Unprecedented discovery revolutionizes our understanding of the Universe"? Maybe, but that's not a problem with the pretty pictures.)
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
There's a civilized planet on the opposite side of that nebula. They look almost just like us, but have a bit more anorexia. Can I get a nebular rim shot?
That was July 2. July 4 the Declaration was written, and August 2 was when it was signed.
Borag Thung! It's a zarjaz star system but I think you'll find that our one is scrotnig also, especially with all the squaxx del thargo here. Splundig vur thrigg!
Why do people assume that you see flares around stars? Could it be because you get them in pictures, even those taken by the Hubble? The longer an exposure is, the more at risk you are for lens flare from light sources. And, since stars are all light sources (a hard concept, I'll admit), the brighter stars in a field of view are always a risk for flares when the exposure time is set to bring out the fainter stars. Granted, nobody wants the lens flares showing up, particularly the scientists, but you can't eliminate them without eliminating some of the data as well.
And then there's the bitching about color photos being from multiple images. Well, the Hubble only takes monocrome photos, so it has to be a composite image. Geez, they even tell you how some of the photos are manipulated to enhance details to make it easier to detect structures at particular wavelengths. That's hardly a 'fabrication'. Instead, it's basic science. Not to mention the photos taken at non-visible-light wavelengths; it's kind of hard to have a UV photo that people can see without using a 'fake' color.
And finally, why is cheerleading bad? The pictures are great; people should see them. Maybe they'll even tell Congress they want to see more. Heaven knows we don't fund NASA's science programs well enough.
it is a day of no importance whatsover, unlike canada day, or picasso's birthday. Just a plain google logo.
My google page happens to be all festive red white and blue.
On this Fourth of July, it's usual -- at least in the U.S. -- to watch fireworks.
Is there somewhere else in the world where it's usual to watch fireworks on July 4?
simon
home page
Does anyone know what the maximum theoretical magnification would be on a space telescope? Let's say there was an observatory sized scope in space, could it make out planets around other systems? Would it ever be possible to see planetary detail?
I always suspected that the best fireworks were no longer made in USA. Now here's proof.
Dear Hubble Telescope, I'm in the process of putting together a server and management wants to keep the costs down. Going with an IDE RAID array instead of SCSI would be a lot cheaper. Is IDE RAID ready for 24/7 deployment?
You know, it's all these colors, man. It's like, you see colours that don't even exist. Like last weekend, I saw these galaxy-sized space clouds man, like some kind of weird giant infra-purple huge spiders with about a billion neon-bulb eyes, man.
Dear Hubble Telescope. I'm a computer enthusiast and my mother asked me to set up a computer for her. I want to recommend Linux, but is it really ready for the desktop?
Man, it ain't always like that. Sometimes, you just see the blackness of space. Know what I mean? See the actual color black. And it's so big, and cold, and it just goes on forever. It's like we're inside this black hole, you know? Sometimes, I think that's what we are, man. Some say, when you're downin' like that, it helps to focus on orange-juice colored stars. Never worked for me. But a couple of weeks ago, I was floating away when things started to get heavy. Then I noticed, space, man, it's full of stars.
those are the aliens, celebrating the independece of XBOX , thus confirm my suspicion that Free-X are a groups of little green men
d035 7hi5 100k 1ik3 4n l337 5i6 2 j00 ?
The other universes are just trying to keep a solid standing wave in phase with ours, and so it's kind of like stem cells, where each cell is a universe.
......
Presenter: Good evening.
I have with me tonight Anne Elk. Mrs Anne Elk.
Miss Elk: Miss.
Presenter: You have a new theory about the brontosaurus/python/multiverse/.
I just wonder whether Hubble can zoom in on the spacecraft constructed for NASA Stardust Project to rendezvous with comet Wild 2. I hope hubble will be positioned to capture the event, when the spacecraft collects dust samples and bring 'em back to earth.
;-)
If anyone asks why I'm so interested, I have my name inscribed on One of the two microchips embedded on board the spacecraft. So is the names of my brother and sister!
Let's hope they reach the comet safely and back! Yeah, and Hubble to be available to capture the event!
Will sys-admin for food
In a blink of an eye, or the click of a mouse, they're on another free-will orbit, in a different solar system, because "life" is to "star" as "ice point" is to "vapor point."
I think that life started as a cyclic holographic record etched with the help of a dancing water drop lens. So there.
..how much this photo resembles goatse.cx.
It would also spend more money on education than war, give everyone the right to see a doctor and generaly have a more well rounded and mentaly heathy population.
In Europe, they've given everyone the right to see a doctor?
My Lord! Are they punishing them all that much?
So does that mean that google worked out from my IP address that I was not in the land of the free and so suppressed the logo? I wonder what else it customises on geography.