20 Years of Hubble

GPLHost-Thomas writes "The Hubble Space Telescope roared into space 20 years ago to begin a career rewriting what we know about the universe around us: the age of the universe, the composition of galaxies' cores, how planets form, and much more. NASA released some of the most spectacular photos for the event."

Comments

Enhancements

[michael_cain]

As much as I enjoy the Hubble pictures, I always try to keep in mind that for most of them, there is no place that you could go and see the same image with your naked eye. False colors and extensions into the infrared portions of the spectrum create images that are both lovely and scientifically valuable; but it's not what you would see if you were positioned to look without equipment.

Re:Enhancements

[MartinSchou]

but it's not what you would see if you were positioned to look without equipment.

What's your point? If we didn't have equipment, we couldn't see the rings around Saturn. We couldn't see Uranus let alone Neptune.

Once you accept that we can use equipment to see things that are beyond the ability of our naked eye, you'd be an idiot to limit said equipment to our eyes' limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This, of course, leaves us with a dilemma - how do we visualize something that we cannot see with our naked eye? If we just display pictures using the actual wavelengths, we can't see anything. So we use false colours.

Re:Enhancements

[ArsonSmith]

I think he meant that you couldn't even take a space ship to some point in space and see the same thing, while with Saturn's rings you could fly to some specific distance from Saturn and see it in it's entirety, while the pillars of creation from almost any point in space would look like mostly empty space.

Re:Nasa?

[click2005]

Then shouldn't that be the Bbc?

Re:Nasa?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Then shouldn't that be the Bbc?

No. According to the BBC style guide, if an acronym is commonly spoken as a word, e.g. LASER, NASA, RADAR, then it is spelt as a normal word; laser, Nasa, radar. However, if the acronym is spoken as a acronym, as a sequence of letters, then it is spelt using all capitals, e.g. BBC, CNN, NSA.

Of course, the is a BBC/UK style guide. Americans do things differently when it comes to acronyms. American organisations often carry acronyms to excess(GE has an internal acronym dictionary), frequently structuring the original description to fit a premade acronym rather than the other way around. The most notorious example of this is the USA PATRIOT Act(yes the USA is part of the acronym). Since they are tailored to be like words, Americans tend to use acronyms as words, but still use upper case(go faster stripe) spelling in many documents. Hence they would write NASA and not Nasa.

As someone who grew up using the UK style, but who spends a lot of time on the US-centric internet I've tended to notice these differences as time goes by. Also, I am no longer able to discern which spelling must be used for countless words in English, which I imagine is the case for a lot of people. It's strange to think that when Hubble launched these kinds of confusion did not really impact on daily life so much.

Re:Nice pix

[Phroon]

The "star filters" you mention are actually diffraction spikes caused by the rods that support the secondary mirror of the telescope. They are an intrinsic quality of the telescope. If you look at the left side of this image of the Hubble under construction you can see three (of the four) black spokes that connect the outer cylindrical support to the cylinder in the middle (this is where the secondary mirror is mounted to). It is the light diffracting off of these spokes that cause the starburst pattern that you noticed.