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."
That picture represents a tiny tiny 11 arc-minute square of the sky (according to Wikipedia, it's like looking through a 1mm x 1mm square hole from 1m away) and it is absolutely jam packed with galaxies, each one containing millions of stars.
I read the internet for the articles.
That is truly amazing. I've been out of the field for about a decade now since retiring, but when I got my PhD in Astronomy in the 1960s, we never expected to have such fantastic photography of the celestial bodies. This is truly a tremendous accomplishment by all involved.
I'm with you that we need bigger space-based telescopes, but I don't think building more in orbit is the best solution. Given the raw material possibilities presented by lunar regolith, I could see the energy cost of moving some materials to the far side of the moon being well offset by the lower amount of materials that must be shunted up there by rocket. We may not have the requisite technologies to set up a lunar optical observatory right now, but I'm confident the technologies could be developed fairly quickly, given a concerted effort.