Hubble in pictures: astronomers' top picks

rpm

rpm

Admin
Staff member
Joined
Jul 22, 2003
Messages
66,805
Reaction score
5,057
Location
Johannesburg
Hubble in pictures: astronomers' top picks

In this special feature, we have invited top astronomers to handpick the Hubble Space Telescope image that has the most scientific relevance to them. The images they’ve chosen aren’t always the colourful glory shots that populate the countless “best of” galleries around the internet, but rather their impact comes in the scientific insights they reveal.
 
Stunning, still remember the drama when it first went up with the blurry images, what a comeback.
 
Imho I think the Hubble Deep Field images are still the most mindblowing.
 
It makes me feel quite small. I wonder what my atoms and particles will combine with and form 30 billion years from now.
 
Cray said:
Stunning, still remember the drama when it first went up with the blurry images, what a comeback.
Click to expand...

Yeah I read somewhere that initially Hubble was a disaster when it settled in orbit; something about the solar panels being the incorrect size.

Great pics :)
 
Last edited:
Beerisgood said:
Yeah I read somewhere that initially Hubble was a disaster when it settled in orbit; something about the solar panels being the incorrect size.

Great pics :)
Click to expand...

It was something to do with the lens being polished incorrectly, someone put a decimal comma in the wrong place with the program that had to make the lens which buggered up the whole lens.
 
bokka1 said:
It was something to do with the lens being polished incorrectly, someone put a decimal comma in the wrong place with the program that had to make the lens which buggered up the whole lens.
Click to expand...

Reading the Wiki entry shows just how minute the tolerances where for the mirror...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Origin_of_the_problem

Within weeks of the launch of the telescope, the returned images indicated a serious problem with the optical system. Although the first images appeared to be sharper than those of ground-based telescopes, Hubble failed to achieve a final sharp focus and the best image quality obtained was drastically lower than expected. Images of point sources spread out over a radius of more than one arcsecond, instead of having a point spread function (PSF) concentrated within a circle 0.1 arcsec in diameter as had been specified in the design criteria.[52][53]

Analysis of the flawed images showed that the cause of the problem was that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. Although it was probably the most precisely figured mirror ever made, with variations from the prescribed curve of only 10 nanometers,[22] at the perimeter it was too flat by about 2,200 nanometers (2.2 micrometers).[54] This difference was catastrophic, introducing severe spherical aberration, a flaw in which light reflecting off the edge of a mirror focuses on a different point from the light reflecting off its center.[
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X