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Boston.com: 2010 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar
As we find ourselves in December once more, I’d like to present the third annual Hubble Space Telescope imagery Advent Calendar for 2010. Keep checking this page - every day, for the next 25 days, a new photo will be revealed here from the Hubble Space Telescope, some old and some new. This year there is also a temporary RSS feed for the calendar. I continue to feel very fortunate to have been able to share photographs and stories with you all this year, and I wish for a Happy Holiday season to all those who will celebrate, and for Peace on Earth to everyone. - Alan (25 photos total - eventually)
Source: Boston.com
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Tony Darnell - “The Hubble Deep Field - The Most Important Image Ever Taken”
“One of my inspirations for starting this website came from the profound experience I had when looking at the Hubble Deep Field images for the first time. I felt I was looking at the most important image humanity had ever taken.
It was important because for the first time, I got a real feeling for just how immense the universe actually is. It’s absolutely mind-blowing if you stop to think about it, that by looking at a patch of sky that appears to have nothing in it, and you stare at it long enough, you see an image full of galaxies.
To fully convey how I feel about the Deep Field images, I composed the following video”
Oh yeah, this video is dedicated to CARL SAGAN. Boo-yah
Source: deepastronomy.com
“The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D”
Wow. I had seen the Ultra Deep Field before, but not like this. I didn’t realize that NASA scientists generated a 3D model showing each and every galaxy at their respective distances. Thank you, Tony Darnell for producing this awe-inspiring video featuring the new HUDF animation.
Source: youtube.com
Astronomy Picture of the Day - 2010 October 13
Science Museum Hubble
Explanation: Will the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) end up in a museum? Probably not, as when it finally goes bust, current plans call for it to be de-orbited into an ocean. But this won’t stop likenesses of the famous floating observatory from appearing in science museums around the globe, sometimes paired with amazing pictures it has taken. Pictured above, in a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the launching of Hubble, a replica of the telescope was given a picturesque setting in the Italian Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in their beautiful and historic Palazzo Loredan. The scene there appears perhaps a bit surreal as the deep space imager appears over a terrestrial tile floor, surrounded by the busts of famous thinkers, and under arches reminiscent of Escher. If you’re lucky, it may even be possible to find an exhibition of Hubble images near you. And if no HST model appears there, you could always build your own.
Source: apod.nasa.gov
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Astronomy Picture of the Day - 2010 October 9
Explanation: In late September, two planets were opposite the Sun in Earth’s sky, Jupiter and Uranus. Consequently closest to Earth, at a distance of only 33 light-minutes and 2.65 light-hours respectively, both were good targets for telescopic observers. Recorded on September 27, this well-planned composite of consecutive multiple exposures captured both gas giants in their remarkable celestial line-up accompanied by their brighter moons. The faint greenish disk of distant planet Uranus is near the upper left corner. Of the tilted planet’s 5 larger moons, two can be spotted just above and left of the planet’s disk. Both discovered by 18th century British astronomer Sir William Herschel and later named for characters in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon is farthest left, with Titania closer in. At the right side of the frame is ruling gas giant Jupiter, flanked along a line by all four of its Galilean satellites. Farthest from Jupiter is Callisto, with Europa and Io all left of the planet’s disk, while Ganymede stands alone at the right.
Source: apod.nasa.gov
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Keep Looking Up
Beautiful, aren’t they? Like illustrations in a book. Only these are real. No one drew them. These exist. And there are at least 200 billion of them. The nine images above are just a few of our galactic neighbors, millions of light years away. They may seem obvious to us now, but not even a hundred years ago their existence was in doubt.
Under the only magnifications possible until the 20th century, most notably until the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in California was built, these fuzzy objects were considered outlying parts of our own galaxy - clouds of gas, perhaps. Other nebulae (“planetary nebulae”, or supernova remnants) had been proven to exist within the Milky Way, and the assumption was that “spiral nebulae” were similarly on the edge of our galaxy, which might just be the edge of the universe.
A great debate about the make up of the universe went on well into the 1920s, when Edwin Hubble, charting Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda “nebula” with the Mount Wilson scope, showed that their distance from us was something near a million light years - much too far to be part of our own Milky Way. Finally proven to be immense conglomerations of stars millions of light years away, they were termed what Immanuel Kant had first called in 1755 the idea of separate Milky Ways: island universes.
Although that term eventually fell out of favor, I’ve always preferred it to galaxy, which sounds like a car model. Galaxy actually comes from the Greek galaktos, literally “milk” (the shared root of our words lactate, lactation, lactic). The myth is that Zeus, desiring his mortal-born son Heracles to have godlike powers, allowed him to suckle on his divine wife Hera’s breast, which, when discovered, caused her to push the baby away, and the resulting spurt of milk created the Milky Way. I think island universe, in addition to separating itself from this mythological nonsense, better communicates the immense solitude of galaxies, surrounded as they are by the vast emptiness of intergalactic space. It also makes me feel like there’s an implied sense of life in those galaxies.
Pause one of those images up there. Imagine that’s our galaxy: dusty disc, spiral arms, supermassive blackhole in the center. Zoom in and pick out one of the tiny pinpricks of light in that whirling disc. It’ll be hard to choose; there are billions. Got it? Now imagine that’s our Sun. And around that sun, visualize our planetary system, a whirling disc too. Along that elliptical plane, on a tiny blue planet circling a tiny yellow star, is, as Carl Sagan wrote, “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was.”
A humbling thought, to say the least. Humankind is nothing. NOTHING to the Universe. We’re a flicker on a speck on a mote. We’ve been lucky enough, thanks to several cosmic coincidences, to not only arise as life, but evolve to intelligence (relatively speaking), and remain protected from the myriad catastrophes surrounding us. Our relatively stable star; our location in the “Goldilocks Zone” of the Solar System (not too hot, not too cold); the axial tilt of the Earth causing seasons; the tidal forces of an overly-large satellite (the result of an unlikely collision between a Mars-sized planetoid and the proto-Earth) creating the right conditions for life; Earth’s strong magnetic field protecting us from radiation; Jupiter, playing gravitational center field, catching our would-be asteroid strikes; the Moon, playing goalie, planting its far side firmly in the face of incoming shots: if it weren’t for these, and a billion other random events, no one would be here at all.
It seems incredibly unlikely that all of the dominoes would fall just so, but they have. And in fact, that’s why we’re here. It’s not a coincidence if these are the prerequisites for intelligent life arising. But as unlikely as it seems, when you’re faced with images like these, how can you not imagine that this has happened countless times, not just in our galaxy, but in the nearly infinite number of other galaxies out there? How can you not believe that right now a vast multitude of individuals across the universe are contemplating images just like these, images that may even include our galaxy, and are attempting to understand their place in the universe - no different than us?
Lets be friends, K?
Source: thetreacheryofwords
