Hubble Talk

I made one of those solar eclipse pinhole projectors in the fifth grade, but I just don’t remember much of it at all. Other than that, I can’t remember experiencing an eclipse, ever, and have therefore decided to take part in the rest of the eclipses this year.

(I know they say you could damage your eyes—and even go blind!—if you fully stare at the sun, and I get it; but I do wonder if anyone simply doesn’t know that and has damaged their eyes due to that lack of knowledge? It seems like one of those things they should tell you as soon as your kid is born (along with not giving the little tyke honey until after his first birthday) just to make sure you pass along the info, right?)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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