The WOW Factor - Reading between the pixels of the Hubble's latest images

The WOW Factor - Reading between the pixels of the Hubble's latest images
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Dr. Gene Nelson sent me a link to an article in the Washington Post about the Hubble Telescope.
It is 4 long html pages and gives us something to think about. We have these WOW moments when we look at the Hubble images. Then again, having seen a lot of them, we may be in danger of burnout.
http://hubblesite.org/
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/

At the beginning of the Apollo missions it was all news and excitement, then things dropped to sound bytes. We are again at the Moon, will this too become sound bytes?
Check out the article.
- LRK -
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003590.html
The Wow Factor
Reading between the pixels of the Hubble's latest images

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, December 6, 2009

By this point, we've all seen so many pretty Hubble pictures that we're in danger of pretty-Hubble-picture burnout. We've seen exploding stars galore. We've seen majestic pillars of gas that are spawning new solar systems. We've seen galaxies colliding, galaxies getting ripped apart, galaxies becoming mired in their own ennui. We've seen Mars and Jupiter and Saturn in such stark close-ups that we can detect the cosmetic surgery scars.

We've seen quasars, pulsars, brown dwarfs, exoplanets, globular clusters and assorted nebulosities. It feels as if we've seen it all. Literally. The whole cosmos, soup to nuts. It kind of makes you wonder if we'll run out of new things to discover. Here's a real headline on a November news release from Stanford: "High-precision measurements confirm cosmologists' standard view of the universe." All figured out; everyone go home now.

So, you can just imagine the challenge that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope scientists faced earlier this year. In May, astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis flew to the Hubble and, defying a stuck bolt that nearly derailed the mission, removed an old camera and replaced it with a better one. They fixed two other instruments, even though these things were not designed for orbital maintenance. Crew members installed new gyroscopes and batteries. After five spacewalks and much derring-do, Hubble was, in effect, a brand-new space telescope.

But what to look at next? The Hubble people had to pick targets to demonstrate the revamped telescope's abilities. They would call these images the Early Release Observations, or ERO (at NASA, everything has an abbreviation). They wanted to produce pictures with lots of (their term) Wow Factor.

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Dr. Nelson has been looking at the WFPC-2 which was recently retrieved from the Hubble Space Telescope and is at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) for a short time. He has seen many visible pits where space debris has struck the radiator surface while it was deployed. WFPC-2 will be on exhibit at NASM for about 2 months, then it will travel to JPL Maybe if you are in the Washington D.C. area you have a chance to visit NASM.

At the top of the above article there is a link to comments and Dr. Nelson posted one. There are a lot more of them now but I will leave you with what he wrote.
- LRK -

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003590_Comments.html#
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The National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the Mall had a special day-long symposium regarding the Hubble Legacy on 18 November 2009.
http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=1636

As a symposium attendee, I appreciated the thought-provoking presentations and panel discussions. There are some special artifacts from the Hubble Space Telescope including COSTAR and the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) that are on special exhibition at the NASM. Some of them will only be there until the end of December, 2009. Be sure and schedule a visit before then. The new "Moving Beyond Earth" Gallery has two of the three new Hubble artifacts - and plenty of "Wow!" with some innovative large scale moving graphics.

(The Hubble Legacy Symposium was made possible by financial support from the Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.)
12/5/2009 9:49:59 PM
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Step back, take a breath, and prepare for a New Year and many more WOW events.
Don't let the excitement wane.
Give it away and watch it come back.

There is much, much, more to learn.
WOW!
- LRK -

Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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