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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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.

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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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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:

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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.

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On February 21, 2006 astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) hoping to discover supernovae noticed an odd flash of light. The light increased steadily, becoming brighter, for 100 days, and then became increasingly dim for another 100 days, before disappearing. The image linked in this post shows the same area before the flash, and during the flash.

The steady increase and decrease in brightness doesn't match any known celestial event. The rise and fall in brightness has a signature that simply has never been recorded for any other type of celestial event. Kyle Barbary of LBNL presented a paper regarding the odd flash this week at the American Astronomical Society. Barbary says "We have never seen anything like it."

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The Hubble has taken a number of images of Mars, but four sets of pictures are particularly notable. There are two opportunities every year when Mars and Earth are the closest they will be to each other. These biennial close approaches of Mars and Earth are identical; they vary every year, because the orbit of Mars around the Sun is extremely elliptical; the close approaches to Earth can range from 35 million to 63 million miles. When Mars and Earth are directly aligned, at their closest, they are said to be in "opposition." There's a super explanation here, even though the most recent example is from 2001.

The first, and in some ways, still the most stunning, was taken in June of 2001. Also be sure to take a look at this detailed image with call-outs labeling the more interesting features.

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Yesterday NASA released a nifty photo of Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, immediately before Ganymede seems to disappear behind Jupiter. Ganymede makes a complete orbit around Jupiter every seven days, but because Ganymede's orbit is tilted, from Earth's perspective, it looks as if Jupiter's moon passes in front of Jupiter, then disappears behind the "dark side" of the massive planet, only to reappear again later. Ganymede is not nearly as tiny as the image would suggest. In fact Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury, but Jupiter is so huge that it dwarfs Ganymede, making the moon seem tiny even though it is the largest moon in the solar system, larger even than Earth's own satellite.

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Researchers at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory report that the Hubble Space Telescope has found CO2 on a planet outside our solar system. HD 189733b is unlikely to actually harbor extraterrestrial life, being a Jovian class planet with a surface temperature of 1,292 degrees F. But the successful detection bodes well for our search for extraterrestrial life.

Although Hubble was originally designed to observe distant stars and galaxies, researcher Mark Swain discovered that he could use its infrared imaging and multi-object spectrometer to identify gases. Using what is called the "secondary eclipse method," Swain waits for the target planet to be eclipsed by its parent star, and compares the light spectra before and after the eclipse.

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Astronomer William Keel of the University of Alabama uncovered an interesting fact about the Earth's view of the universe around it. Perhaps this isn't one that you'd run across, but when I did, I found it rather mind-boggling. Was it only by a stroke of luck that we were ever in a position to realize that such a thing as the Milky Way galaxy exists?

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