Slashdot Mirror
Crab Nebula by Hubble
nut writes "I just wanted to draw people's attention to the Image Of The Day courtesy of The Hubble Telescope. There's a couple of other pages with a little more info.
I don't know how anyone can doubt the value of putting the Hubble telescope up there when it gives you desktop wallpaper like this :o)"
You use that as a wallpaper??? Where is the 1280x1024 (minimum) version?
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/37/images/ a/formats/1280_wallpaper.jpg
Joy Joy, billion dollar wall paper.
Please spend my money elsewhere.
If you look closely, and cross your eyes a little bit, You can see the face of the Devil. I need to Google the National Enquirer now ...
Also looks like Cotton Candy.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Hubble is amazing and all, and has produced some fabulous images (and maybe, just maybe some actual scientific data), but isn't it time to retire the 1 megapixel bird and replace it with a 5, or 16 megapixel, or perhaps a 4 gigapixel satellite instead?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
It's probably worth mentioning, in case people hadn't noticed, that you can--and I do--have the Hubble Site configured as a "Slashbox", so the current "image of interest" (at present, this Crab Nebula mozaic) will appear as a small image on the Slashdot front page. I've noticed (and grabbed) numerous images this way. Note that this only works, as far as I know, if you have a named account--but you don't need a subscription. Just go to Preferences, click on "Homepage", go down to the "Customize Slashboxes" section, and put a checkmark next to "Hubble Site". You'll be glad you did.
:)
(At least, I assume you'll be glad you did, since, otherwise, why are you bothering to read the discussions about this article in the first place?)
I tend to get my space image fix from NASA, but this looks good as well. I will be adding this site to my daily round of websites to procrastinate with. **clicky**
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
I have my Home Page set to the "Astronomy Picture of the Day"
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
The best placee to find pictures of Saturn and it's moons from the Cassini Spacecraft.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/Cassini
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/37/images/ a/formats/full_jpg.jpgHere, (14.5 MB), is a jpg of the nebula so you don't have to download that stupid viewer.
I love random hex numbers! Just like this one, 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Some simple multiplication leads me to guess in the range of 6x the size of the extent of our Sun's effects. The article says 6 light years, but can anyone put that into a little perspective?
...so I'm about 6 light-nanoseconds tall, the screen I'm facing is about one by one and a half light nanoseconds.
A light-second is about a billion feet or 300,000,000m, roughly the same as the distance to the Moon.
86400 seconds in a day, so a light-day is about 26,000,000,000,000m, or 4-5 times the distance to Pluto and Charon, or 170 times as far away as the Sun is from us.
A light year is 9,500,000,000,000 km; and Proxima Centauri (the nearest star) is about 4 of those away, and the Crab nebula is about 4,000 of those from us.
Putting all of that into scale is kind of difficult. Making the Sun as big as a basketball, gives you a barely-visible Earth about 30m away, Jupiter a squash (or golf) ball about 150m away, and pluto an infinitesimal speck over a kilometer out. A light-day from the basketball sun would be a circle 9km across, and if you put the basketball sun in the middle of the US, the next basketball would be in Greenland, northwest Alaska, or Brasil. If you put it in my home town (Perth, Western Australia), you'd be looking at the next basketball in South Africa, southern Russia, or the middle of the Pacific. And the Crab nebula twenty times as far away as the Moon.
The fastest manned spacecraft has travelled at ~40,000km/h, so it would take about 100,000 years (a thousand lifetimes, two and a half thousand generations) to get to the nearest star and 100,000,000 years to get to the Crab. I imagine that even the spectacular views as you approached would somewhat lose their appeal after a few generations.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This link shows you the last 7 days' worth of new images. They occasionally post some really cool (or interesting for other reasons, e.g. ultra high res) images that don't make it to the newsier sites.
Here is one of my favourites of Valles Marineris at 9002x3126 pixels. A good excuse for a second monitor: "now I can use this as wallpaper". (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It is a shame that no American space telescope will be in operation when Hubble takes its last pictures in 2008. The JWST will replace it in 2011, with a much different primary mirror design. it is an array of hexagons, rather than a single large mirror. One advantage is that the smaller mirrors are easier to shape because they don't warp under their own weight (as much.) JWST will have a 25 m^2 aperature, while hubble only has 4.5 m^2. Tinsley SSG, manufacturer of Hubble's corrective optics, is manufacturing the 18 Beryllium (lightweight) hexagonal mirrors. Wish them luck.