Hubble Talk

The second full moon in a single month is a fairly rare occurence, rare enough that it's called a blue moon. A blue moon occurs every 2.7 years because our twelve month calendar doesn't quite match the lunar cycle or the time it takes for the moon to revolve around the Earth. A lunar cycle takes 29 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes. Roughly. I should note that the moon doesn't, unfortunately, turn even slightly blue, but it's still an additional opportunity to view a full moon.

New Year's eve this year is a blue moon; we've already had one on December 2. But it's even more nifty than that. First, while a blue moon occurs about every 2 and a half years, we haven't had one on New Year's Eve since 1990. Read more

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Northern lights are created with the help of solar wind.

Watching the skies is just part of the day, and night for some people. I am one of them. The first thing I do every morning is go outside and look up at the sky. The last thing I do before going to bed, each night, is to watch the sky for awhile. Sometimes, I even lay in bed and just look up through the window until it is morning. When I am not outside looking at the sky, often with a camera in my hand, I check in with my favorite websites to catch up on space weather and the new photos of sky watchers around the world.

The sky is always changing, revealing itself in glimpses. I think that is why I find it so fascinating. Space is a mystery we will never stop discovering and its interaction with our earth's atmosphere create some of the most spectacular sights we will ever witness. Read more

The refurbished and substantially upgraded Hubble telescope is back online after three months of intense testing to make sure the installation was properly calibrated. The space shuttle Atlantis completed the upgrades and repairs during a thirteen-day mission in May. Engineers expect the Hubble to continue being extremely productive at least until 2014; the Hubble installation is nineteen years old now, and the Hubble has already outlived initial expectations, so I have high hopes and expectations for the future.

In addition to vastly increasing the power of the telescope, new light-measuring instruments, gyroscopes, and a much better camera are already producing results. Read more

Hubble's ultra deep field, in 3-D animation.

Here are more resources about Animation for Physics and Astronomy.

As the crew replaces and repairs Hubble equipment, including decomissioning the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) before installing the newer, more sophisticated camera and imaging equipment, Hubble sent one last "farewell" shot from the old camera. Read more

The Hubble Space Telescope group released an image last week that shows four of Saturn's moons in transit across the face, and rings, of Saturn. This is a fairly rare event, occurring only every fifteen years. This particular image was taken on February 24, 2009. Because the orbits of the larger Saturnian satellites are in the ring plane, or edge-on, it's an exceedingly spectacular event, and the Hubble team succeeded wildly in capturing it for us. </p.

I've linked to a small image of the moons in transit across the face of Saturn in this post; you can click it for a more detailed view, with annotations. You'll see, moving from the top, Saturn's largest moon, Titan (larger even than Mercury), looking faintly orange in color because Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere is tinted by the side effects of sunlight on methane and nitrogen. Read more

As part of the celebration in honor of the International Year of Astronomy, and the 400th anniversary of Galileo's discoveries, NASA has released special images made at each of its associated observatories: the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Each observatory has turned its scopes, using a variety of equipment and wave lengths, to the spiral galaxy known as Messier 101, or M 101. Hubble provided an optical view, Spitzer an infrared, and Chandra an X-ray view. The data from each observatory was combined to create a single image, linked above.

M 101 is a spiral galaxy, larger but otherwise much like our own milky way, and located in the constellation Ursa Major. M 101's nickname is "the Pinwheel Galaxy," because, well, the gas clouds formed around the stars make it look very like a pinwheel. Read more

As part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's astronomical discoveries 400 years ago, scientists and enthusiasts all over the world are celebrating 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy. NASA is offering everyone a chance to vote on which of six possible astronomical objects should be studied by the "new and improved" Hubble later this year. The six objects include: Read more

While we wait, with varying degrees of impatience, for the final Hubble upgrade I thought I'd post about some of my very favorite Hubble images from the past. Given that the Hubble entered orbit in April of 1990, there are a lot of images to choose from and for many images we now have a lot more information and better understanding of what the images show than we did a few years ago. Read more