NASA Christens the Spitzer Space Telescope

LMCBoy writes "NASA today renamed the Space Infrared Telescope Facility to the Spitzer Space Telescope, after a great scientist. The renaming coincides with the release of the beautiful first science images from the telescope, which was launched in August."

Comments

Re:"Science image"

[barakn]

Yeah. There was a previous image, but it was a calibration image taken before the telescope had cooled down to its final operating temperature, and /. jabbered about it. To get good quality data they have to subtract a dark-field image (basically a shot taken with the lens cap on) from the image of the subject (and do other stuff), but when the telescope was warm it would have imaged its own heat. Makes for noisy data, which is why they imaged really infrared-bright stars. As we already know stars emit infrared, the scientific value of the image was to make scientists salivate over the prospect of better images in the future.

Re:angular resolution clarification

[barakn]

VLBI is great for radio telescopes, but even regular, non-VLB interferometry is very difficult in the infrared, and all but impossible (with current tech) in the optical.

Hang on there. Astronomical interferometry with visible light has been going on since Albert Michelson's measurements of the angular diameters of Jupiter's moon in 1890 and 1891. Perhaps you're talking about imaging interferometry. Even in that case, imaging of simple systems such as binary stars has already occurred.