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New Hubble Ultra Deep Field In Infrared
Hynee writes "Just in time for Christmas, HubbleSite has released a Hubble Ultra Deep Field redux. The original was in visible light; this version, five years on, is in infrared (1.05, 1.25 and 1.6 um).
The observation is in support of the upcoming JWST, which will observe exclusively in infrared, but the newly installed WFC3 does seem to provide some extra resolution over the 2004 visible observations with WFC2."
How old does that make you? :-)
In any case, it is perhaps thanks to people like you that the field has advanced to such a degree when we can enjoy such mindbogglingly marvelous photos of the Universe.
From the article:
"Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one-billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye."
To put that into an easier perspective to visualize for people too lazy to check wikipedia before doing the calculations themselves, the width of the image is about 1/10th to 1/8th the diameter of the Moon seen from Earth (depending on when and where you are).
(Heh, captcha was "abstruse".)
Well the 42m mirror E-ELT is coming up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope
Too bad they cancelled the 100m OWL, it would have kicked ass http://www.gemini.edu/science/maxat/future/future.html
Besides, it had a much catchier name.
The new image is 2.4 arc-minutes wide according to hubblesite.org
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
That is simply awesome looking. But... only 2345x2039? The original maxed out at 6200x6200. What gives? :P
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
I took the 2004 UDF image and rotated/cropped as needed to match with the 2009 UDF image so you can switch between the two and compare the differences.
2004 UDF | 2009 UDF
The new image uses infrared versus the visible light filters from the 2004 image. The resolution may not differ much between the two images, but the infrared will pick up deeper objects that we missed with the visible light filters. However the visible light image tends to pick up more detail such as in the spiral galaxy in the middle-left. That galaxy is known as UDF 7556 and what you see is how it was 6.1 billion years after the big bang.
This stuff is so cool.
I graduated Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in aerospace engineering. Every year, the senior level Bachelor's students participate in a year long spacecraft design mission. Approximately 30 - 40 students team up to fulfill some mission requirements thought up by a few of the professors. I wasn't able to attend the final design review last year, but I know for a fact that the project they worked on involved setting up a telescope array on the dark side of the moon. I have no doubt that their design probably had some holes in it and definitely failed to account for some things because, well, all student designs do. However, I also know for a fact that those 30 some odd students had to develop a design and implementation (launch, orbital trajectories, power solutions, thermal balancing issues, communications systems, the whole shebang if you will) that was practical and possible. In other words, if they relied on unobtainium, they would not have passed.
The moral of the story is that if a handful of Bachelor's students can come up with a practical design concept in 9 months, there really is no reason that NASA, JPL, or, hell, even some commercial agency, couldn't set up a full telescope array on the dark side of the moon given proper funding and motivation. Then again, that's the kicker. Grades are great motivation for students. In the real world, someone has to fork over dollars, and people don't like doing that for science anymore....
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