http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1244686/Amateur-star-gazer-captures-astonishing-images-Milky-Way-hole-roof-garden-shed.html
His photographs show a vivid variety of star clusters light years from Earth and have been compared favourably with the images taken from the £2.5billion Hubble telescope.
...and if you look down in the comments in the article his wife makes a comment.
Oh what a proud wife i am!!!!! and no your not getting a bigger telescope. - LISA SHAH, POWYS, 21/1/2010 6:12
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/
Hubble Directly Observes Planet Orbiting Fomalhaut
I can't help but wonder what the astronomers peering over these pictures did when they spotted the planet. Can you imagine the chills they must have felt when they spotted the planet? Did they leap up and "WHOOP?" Or were they more sedate?
This is a remarkable achievement and has occurred sooner than predicted.
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
That's a planet you're looking at 25 light years away. Now that's cool.
News article: Hubble Telescope captures first image of alien planet seen with visible light
Discover magazine article about it here: badastronomy @ discover.com
It's a gravity lens.
Arcs are common results of lensing. That’s what you’re seeing here; the distant galaxy image split in two, arcs surrounding the spherical galaxy between them. An eye!
Related posts: Hubble Discovers 67 more "lensed" galaxies.
This will be the final servicing mission performed by the Space Shuttle. After this one or the other spacecraft, Hubble or Shuttle, will be decommissioned before a servicing mission 5 will be necessary.
Nasa: Servicing Mission 4 Essentials
What a remarkable piece of engineering the Hubble has been. One of the true intersections between science and engineering and art and even perhaps spirituality. If you have looked at the images from Hubble and haven't felt humbled at some point along the way, well, you ain't no geek.
Hubble's triumphs continue to accumulate thanks to a unique design that allows astronauts to repair and upgrade the telescope while it remains in orbit. Repairs keep the telescope functioning smoothly, while upgrades to the instruments bring a slew of new discoveries and science.
Review of the Servicing 4 mission.
This is fascinating...
At Goddard engineers and astronauts work together developing tools and techniques to resurrect two malfunctioning science instruments currently on orbit inside Hubble.
Of course the astronauts are integrally involved in the training, I keep forgetting they are no longer still rocket jockeys but engineers and physicists.
Detail of what a servicing mission entails. Cool video from the Space Telescope Operations Control Center (STOCC).
and crew training.
SEE not infer.
The technology does not use glass lenses nor reflective mirrors but an advanced form of a pinhole camera, the "pinhole" technique is called Fresnel zone plates.
New Scientist article.
The technical hurdles would be tricky but nothing unbelievable.
Essentially we would need to launch two spacecraft.: one is the "lens" and one is the "receptor". The focal point using the Fresnel method is kilometers away from the lense, ergo the two spacecraft solution.
Go read the whole article, just fascinating.
Feeds right into this post: Planet Hunting, The Next Generation - The Lyot Project
We gotta keep this telescope operational: Hubble discovers 67 new gravitationally lensed galaxies
What is gravitational lensing?
Gravitational lensing occurs when light travelling toward us from a distant galaxy is magnified and distorted as it encounters a massive object between the galaxy and us. These gravitational lenses often allow astronomers to peer much farther back into the early universe than they would normally be able to do.
Here is a cool video of an Einstein Ring.
An Einstein ring is a complete circle image of a background galaxy, which is formed when the background galaxy, a massive, foreground galaxy, and the Hubble Space Telescope are all aligned perfectly.
Therein creating a complete circle lense effect.
So pretty pictures are nice, but what impact do these discoveries have on astro-physics? Well read on dear surfer, read on.
...they can be used to create a census of galaxy masses in the universe to test the predictions of cosmological models.
Basically, since we understand how gravity works here, and we can get estimates of galaxy size out there, we can then compare and contrast and see if gravity remains constant from one side of the visible universe to the other.
In our modern world we take the fact that anyone can just go click-click-click and see any number of amazing pictures from the Hubble Space Tellescope.
We don't even think about how unimaginably amazing this would be for someone from 1950-60-70 even the 1980s, not to mention earlier than that. NOBODY saw stuff like this. And now here it is served to you on your home LCD screen.
Accelerating returns indeed.
I now end your daily Kurzweil minute with this picture.