Hubble is still busy!

I caught a show on PBS the other night that was all about the Hubble repair. It was amazing how many tools they had to invent, how much training went into it (they actually practice in a shuttle sized pool) and how one mistake, like a lost screw would have made the mission all for nothing.



If you are interested - and I sure hope you are, you can watch the whole show here! Get some popcorn and a drink and settle back in your chair. This is amazing stuff!

Hubble Snaps some Cool Shots

Remember when I told you about the Hubble mission and the update it was receiving. I told you how this would be the last time - even though what these astronauts did will last the massive telescope a decade.

The first shots are up and posted. This is one of the Butterfly Nebula
It's colorful "wings" are actually cauldrons of heated gas ejected from a dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun. The star is now discharging a stream of ultraviolet radiation that makes the cast-off material glow.

This is Omega Centauri.

There are about 10 million stars here. Most of the stars seen here are white-yellow, similar to our Sun. The orange stars are further into their lifecycle, having become larger and cooler. They'll continue to cool and expand in size, eventually becoming red giants seen here as the bright red dots.

This is Stephan' Quintet. Don't be fooled into thinking that they are all right together. They're not.

The galaxy in the upper left is believed to actually be seven times closer to Earth than the rest of the group. The three other galaxies have distorted shapes, elongated spiral arms, and gaseous tails as evidence of their close proximity.

Here are the high resolution shots.

Saturn animation

It has been awhile since I posted here and I apologize for that. Life interrupts a good deal of my best intentions - as you will find out as you grow up and grow older Junior. I just hope that your interest in the night sky will not wane in the process. Building on what you know at age twelve is a lot easier than trying to build on your knowledge at age 52 - not impossible just harder.

Here is a link to a great Saturn animation I found that might interest you. It was compiled over a six year period.

Mars, finally

I will never stop marveling at what new technology can bring. For you, it is as natural as waking up. The latest comes from Google Earth, which your dad should download for you here.

Here is what it will shows of Mars. Yes, Mars!


And if the clouds ever clear, you need to check this out this weekend. And tell me about when I get here next week..

Tripping the Light Fantastic

As you look at those stars on the night sky, you should always keep in mind that what you are seeing is what happened a long time ago. For hundreds, if not thousands of years, geniuses such as Einstein and Isaac Newton and even further back to ancient Greeks and Persians wondered about light. For a really long time, it was believed that light could travel at any speed through space because, in those days, before telescopes, ancient stargazers believed that there was nothing to block the light. So they thought it could speed up and slow down.

But now we know differently. Space is not as empty as everyone once believed and the speed of light is one of those amazing things that stays the same, no matter what. This is a good thing if you think about it for a second. Because light can be counted on to behave the same near earth as it does billions of miles away, we can make predictions about what to expect.

Consider this image, done to simulate exactly how fast light travels from the Earth to the Moon. It takes 1.25555 seconds. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to get to us.

I remember you telling me what you learned when you did that project on Einstein a couple of years back. You told me that light traveled 186,242.4 miles a second. How fast is that? Suppose you were shine a light from Bend to New York on the other side of the United States. That beam of light would travel back and forth 60 times in a second.

This galaxy is the farthest light has traveled, measured by Hubble at 13 billion light years away. The universe was only a billion years old when this galaxy (on the right) began to send its light out, so long ago, the earth wasn't even here yet. Because that is so fast, it is almost impossible to imagine. Look at your Mom across the room. What you are seeing is not what you think. It actually happened 20 billionth of second ago. Now imagine that our Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. In terms of galaxies, that's not very large. But it does require a very large imagination to try and picture that king of event.

This is the closest galaxy to us at 42,000 light years away.

Never to be Seen Again

The last time I wrote, we were talking about the amazing things that the Hubble telescope had seen in its time in space. Often referred to as the people's telescope, the Space Shuttle not only successfully grabbed the telescope in space - with all kinds of really dangerous space junk floating around - but repaired it. When they were done, they simply released it. It will never be seen by humans again.

Here are the pictures of that mission.

A Fresh Look at Deep Space

This past week, the last space shuttle mission visited one of the most exciting accomplishments in modern science, the Hubble Telescope. Unlike the ground based telescope you use, this look into space does not have all of the interference of light (remember how I explained that light from the city takes some of what you are looking at and makes it harder to see) and the stuff floating around the upper atmosphere (the layers of air and gases that protect our planet from harmful rays from the sun). The views without these problems are simply awesome.

The mission these astronauts were given was basically a repair and replace job. There were several systems that had broken down over the years and need to be fixed. But even more importantly was the job of replacing the 16 year old camera.

Among the new camera’s features is the ability to record images in the normally invisible ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelength bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as in visible light. The infrared capability extends Hubble’s reach into the past because the expansion of the universe stretches the wavelengths of light from distant galaxies to longer, redder wavelengths.

Light comes in waves, some you can see and others you cannot. This new camera can see what your eyes would not. Ultraviolet (UV) light has shorter wavelengths than visible light. Though these waves are invisible to the human eye, some insects, like bumblebees, can see them! So can Hubble. This is a look at how this telescope sees things in space differently than the human eye.

Scientists have divided the ultraviolet part of the spectrum into three regions: the near ultraviolet, the far ultraviolet, and the extreme ultraviolet. The three regions are distinguished by how energetic the ultraviolet radiation is, and by the "wavelength" of the ultraviolet light, which is related to energy.

The near ultraviolet, abbreviated NUV, is the light closest to optical or visible light. The extreme ultraviolet, abbreviated EUV, is the ultraviolet light closest to X-rays, and is the most energetic of the three types. The far ultraviolet, abbreviated FUV, lies between the near and extreme ultraviolet regions. It is the least explored of the three regions. FUV is what Hubble, with its new camera will be able to see.

Our Sun emits light at all the different wavelengths in electromagnetic spectrum, but it is ultraviolet waves that are responsible for causing our sunburns.

The telescope was named after Edwin Hubble, who took many photographs through 100 inch reflecting Hooker telescope, proving they was lots of stuff beyond our own galaxy, and determining the existence of several other galaxies such as our own milky way, which had until then been believed to be the universe.

Hubble had also devised a classification system for the various galaxies he observed, sorting them by content, distance, shape, and brightness; it was then he noticed redshifts in the emission of light from the galaxies. What he saw was that these galaxies were moving away from each other at a steady rate equal to the distance between them. From these observation, he was able to formulate Hubble's Law in 1929, helping astronomers determine the age of the universe, and proving that the universe was expanding.

Hubble once said: "Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."


Below are pictures taken by this telescope.