Hubble Telescope is Back: Fantastic New Images Released

[mickw]

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in action after its most recent upgrade, with a spectacular array of new images showing off the telescope's new capabilities.

Among the first images – a closely guarded secret until today – is one of galaxy NGC 6217. The picture was taken with NASA's newly refurbished Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090909-new-hubble-images.html

And more:   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8246556.stm

[Mac]

Wow, all i can say is it looks nearly as good as one of Fays, 

[Rick]

The Hubble Space Telescope is back to snapping pictures of the cosmos, supplying Earth with its precious allowance of desktop wallpapers. And with upgrades and repairs performed last May, the orbiting observatory is doing science even better than before.

NASA shared its jubilation today with a fresh round of images featuring Hubble's new premier instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

"This marks a new beginning for Hubble," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The telescope was given an extreme makeover and now is significantly more powerful than ever, and well-equipped to last into the next decade."

More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/09/hubble_first_wfc3_shots/

[Ian]

Wow, all i can say is it looks nearly as good as one of Fays, 

You mean Hubble's got a wonky pier too?

[Rick]

Just the images: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8247245.stm

[mickw]

The Hubble Space Telescope's powerful new camera has taken the most detailed image yet of star birth in the nearby spiral galaxy M83.

Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus.

In this galaxy, the sharp eye of the Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) — newly installed this summer during the telescope's fourth and final servicing mission — has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants.

WFC3's broad wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals stars at different stages of evolution, allowing astronomers to dissect the galaxy's star-formation history.

The new image reveals in unprecedented detail the current rapid rate of star birth in this spiral galaxy. The newest generations of stars are forming largely in clusters on the edges of the dark dust lanes, the backbone of the spiral arms. These fledgling stars, only a few million years old, are bursting out of their dusty cocoons and producing bubbles of reddish glowing hydrogen gas

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091105-hubble-m83.html

Hires:   http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2009-29-a-print.jpg

[MarkS]

Very similar to my M33 ...

[mickw]

Very similar to my M33

But a lot more expensive 

[Carole]

Very similar to my M33 ...

I was just thinking the same when I read your post. 

Carole

[mickw]

A recent image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the perfect dust laboratory in the sky and could help astronomers pin down the raw ingredients needed to give birth to baby stars.

The stellar photo is a composite of four images taken with different filters by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The resulting close-up shot reveals the northwest region of the Iris Nebula, or NGC 7023. The nebula is a region of star formation that lies about 1,400 light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus. (A light-year is the distance light will travel in a year, which is about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion km).

The image shows billowing mounds of cosmic dust. Such dust is made up of tiny particles of solid matter ranging in size from 10 to 100 times smaller than the dust grains you might find blanketing household furniture on terra firma.

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091201-st-hubble-image.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+spaceheadlines+%28SPACE.com+Headline+Feed%29