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Hubble Turns 25
Taco Cowboy points out that the Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 today.
Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Currently, it is flying about 340 miles over the Earth and circling us every 97 minutes. While the telescope itself is not really much to look at, that silver bucket is pure gold for astronomers. Scientists have used that vantage point to make ground-breaking observations about planets, stars, galaxies and to reveal parts of our universe we didn't know existed. The telescope has made more than a million observations and astronomers have used Hubble data in more than 12,700 scientific papers, "making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built," according to NASA. ... NASA aims to keep Hubble operating through at least 2020 so that it can overlap with its successor. The James Webb Space Telescope is due to launch in October 2018 and begin observations in mid-2019.
NASA celebrated by releasing a new, epic image from Hubble titled "Celestial Fireworks." It is accompanied by an impressive flythrough video. Some nice galleries of Hubble images have been put together at the NY Times and Slate, but a bigger collection is available directly from the official Hubble website.
Both my scientific curiosity and my desktop backgrounds thank you.
Hubble was born on the same day as the telescope named after him?
I love the Hubble, love the pictures and the data, seriously one of the best investment we have made up there.
The single most mind blowing photo for me?
Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
http://www.nasa.gov/images/con...
Plenty Hubble photos are far more beautiful, but the sheer scale of it, the light of other times.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I always disliked these sort of images because I felt they were closer to an artist's conception than a real image, since they are processed and interpolated so much. Now I regret not looking at the recent /. article on that very subject.
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We can watch this video to see the best 25 of Stunning Images taken by Hubble Space Telescope in 25 Years.
Why on Earth is PerkinElmer still in business after knowingly messing up the mirror? They only had to pay $25 million for their "mistake". How much did all the investigation, training, preparation and the actual flight to Hubble cost the tax payers?
Some things need to be said...
Hubble only feels like 24.99996 years old.
You, apparently.
For anyone who was paying attention at the time when it was launched, the fact that Hubble has stayed functional this long is a pretty big deal. The drama that unfolded after it was launched, with the mirror problems and subsequent corrective missions, was an amazing feat of engineering.
Politicians and others jumped on the anti-Hubble bandwagon pretty quickly, and at the time it was another bad day for science in the early 90's as the SCSC(Desertron) was decommissioned.
Then the mirror was fixed... and we saw the pictures.
In all of human history, no one could have imagined that mankind would be able to peer back in time and deep into the depths of space as Hubble has allowed us to.
In all the imaginings of the earliest self aware humans, to the priests of ancient Babylon who studied the stars, to Galileo and Edwin Hubble himself, the images and knowledge that Hubble has bestowed on us are riches beyond compare.
Thank you Hubble and all who have been involved in the project.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Have gnu, will travel.
Hubble is a prime example of why we space nutters want to get people out there. When we sent Hubble up into its 375-mile orbit, it was nothing but a paperweight until we were able to send a crew up there to fix it.
Not to mention that it was carried into orbit using Space Shuttle as its "first stage."
Who gives a shit?
How about "Civilization." It's hard to think of other modern projects that have advanced the knowledge base of humankind as far as the Hubble Space Telescope. Not bad for being a "multi-billion dollar flop" when launched.
Of all the things NASA has accomplished, this is one of the big ones.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Of course, without the cost for the manned space program, we could have launched a dozen replacement telescopes, and still have money left over for a cake.
Flythrough video -- I have no objection to enhanced pictures but I do want to understand exactly what I am looking at. There can't possibly be enough parallax for any traditional stereo imaging.
Where does the depth information in a video like this come from, and what has happened here--has the image been basically digitized and then completely regenerated by shifting every image pixel in it according to its distance from the virtual "camera" position?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Create an account at Heavens-Above to get time and direction to see space objects. http://www.heavens-above.com/ It's a great resource.
You can combine images over time to recover depth information.
We did launch several more of these... as spy satellites.
The cake is a lie.
I have a small 'scope but my area has become too light polluted for me to see. I could see Andromeda and other objects but can't now. I would drive 45 miles to a remote, dark location but haven't done that in a few years.
Not sure what civilization you are referring to, but here in the good ole' US-of-A everyone is primarily concerned about buying beer, their heroin addiction, and gay marriage.
To simplify, consider parallax between "now" and where earth was 6 months ago
Given that it's in a 375-mile orbit, Hubble was also (and still is) a pretty lousy paperweight.
Not sure what civilization you are referring to, but here in the good ole' US-of-A everyone is primarily concerned about buying beer, their heroin addiction, and gay marriage.
The price of admission for us geeky folks to support the infrastructure responsible for the bread-and-circuses is that they have to throw a little bone (less than 1% of GDP) to things we think are cool. Otherwise we would all be cyberterrorists and commies.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!