Astronomy / Space Hubble is back in action and better than ever.

[Steve O B Have]

Source: http://www.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/25/

September 9, 2009: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision.

Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula. With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A new spectrograph slices across billions of light-years to map the filamentary structure of the universe and trace the distribution of elements that are fundamental to life. The telescope's new instruments also are more sensitive to light and can observe in ways that are significantly more efficient and require less observing time than previous generations of Hubble instruments. NASA astronauts installed the new instruments during the space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. Besides adding the instruments, the astronauts also completed a dizzying list of other chores that included performing unprecedented repairs on two other science instruments.

Butterfly Nebula
The planetary nebula NGC 6302, more popularly called the Butterfly Nebula: a star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun has blown off its outer layers.

A pillar of gas and dust known as the Carina Nebula: stars are forming in this cloud. Hubble's two views, in the visible (top) and infrared (bottom), show astronomers very different detail.

Stephan's Quintet is a collection of colliding galaxies. Only four are actually close together; the fifth (at upper left) is much closer to Earth than the others.

The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217: the first image taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument that was repaired on the shuttle servicing mission.

 

[Typhoon]

Woah, They are some awesome pictures there. That Butterfly Nebula is amazing. Just looking at those pictures makes me feel small :/

 

[Steve O B Have]

Woah, They are some awesome pictures there. That Butterfly Nebula is amazing. Just looking at those pictures makes me feel small :/

They are EPICALLY humbling.

 

[Sir.Tj]

They are stunning pictures, wish my telescope was that powerful

 

[Steve]

They are stunning pictures, wish my telescope was that powerful

Tsk. Just attach your camera to your telescope's eyepiece, leave the shutter open all night and I GUARANTEE you'll get better pictures than those.


Or failing that, a picture of a fox going through your bins

 

[Sir.Tj]

Tsk. Just attach your camera to your telescope's eyepiece, leave the shutter open all night and I GUARANTEE you'll get better pictures than those.


Or failing that, a picture of a fox going through your bins

I can feel a Heath Robinson moment coming on....

 

[Sir.Tj]

Just found this on Wired.com.

D/L http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/

Called the Bubble Nebula, this eerie, translucent sphere is created by fierce winds from a superhot star 40 times the size of our sun. Moving at nearly 4.5 million miles per hour, stellar winds whip the cloud of gas around the star into a near-perfect bubble, which stands out from the rest of the more stationary gas in this emission nebula.
Located 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, the bubble is about 6 light-years in diameter and glows pink because of the red, hot gas that surrounds it. The first clear picture of the Bubble Nebula was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1997, and this new image was captured in July by the South Common Observatory in Britain.

(Whoops put this on the wrong thread, could one of the mods move it to Steve's Hubble thread?)

 

[Sir.Tj]

D/L http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/hubbledeepfield/#more-11108



Hubble Goes Deep, Finds Farthest Galaxies Yet

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.
Analyses of infrared images of these galaxies captured in late August and early September with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 suggest there were fewer bright galaxies early in cosmic history and those galaxies formed stars at an unexpectedly low rate.
Because the researchers do not yet have measurements of the wavelengths that make up the starlight from these galaxies, they do not directly know how far away the galaxies lie. But the starlit bodies’ colors suggest that about 16 reside roughly 12.9 billion light-years from Earth and another five or so sit even further, a record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years away.
“We are looking back 13 billion years and seeing galaxies just 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was like a 4-year-old,” says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of one of the discovery teams.

 

[Steve]

Wonderful picture. Good find T.j