A supernova explosion is a staggering event to imagine. At the core of an evolved star, runaway nuclear processes release a tremendous amount of energy in a fraction of a second. The mass of the star is blown apart at speeds of millions of miles per hour. A vast shock wave streams across interstellar space, followed by the blast... Continue Reading →
One of the more philosophical concepts that astronomers have to deal with on an everyday basis is the commingling of space and time in astronomical images. The underlying idea is straightforward. The speed of light is finite. Light from a star or nebula or galaxy takes a measurable amount of time to cross the space... Continue Reading →
May 4th is celebrated as Star Wars Day across the internet. We who do "serious science" have always enjoyed the fictional universes of books and films, but the crossover to our work has generally been tangential. But not always! In December 2015, our news team jumped on the bandwagon and released an image with the... Continue Reading →
Each year, we celebrate the April 24, 1990, launch of the Hubble Space Telescope with a special observation. This year, for the 29th Anniversary, we wanted to highlight the combination of imaging and spectroscopy that underlies the astronomical research results. The target chosen to illustrate these ideas is the Southern Crab Nebula. This symmetric gas... Continue Reading →
The crisp, stunning images from the Hubble Space Telescope are a wonder to behold. As one can see in the image comparison below, Hubble's views are significantly higher resolution than similar images obtained by ground-based observatories. Terrestrial telescopes must look through Earth's atmosphere, which blurs the view and limits their resolution. Orbiting above Earth's atmosphere,... Continue Reading →
The Hubble Space Telescope recently observed an asteroid in the process of falling apart. Known as 6478 Gault, located in the main asteroid belt of our solar system between Mars and Jupiter, and roughly 2.5 miles wide, this asteroid is rotating so fast—about once every 2 hours—that it is literally flinging itself apart. The observations... Continue Reading →
A personal gallery I have been involved with the Hubble Space Telescope mission and the Space Telescope Science Institute for more than 35 years, a long time to be at one place. For most of that time I have helped translate Hubble's amazing science data into images distributed worldwide to help describe what we have... Continue Reading →
For a while I thought my career and my personal life were fairly separate, but lately I've realized there's more overlap than I thought. I have been interested in both photography and astronomy for most of my life. I ended up pursuing astronomy as a career, but never stopped taking pictures. And most recently I... Continue Reading →
You may have noticed that our favorite red planet, Mars, has been a popular feature in the news recently. Not that we need any special reasons to take a closer look at Mars, but a number of coincident events have brought this about: [1] Mars has just passed through opposition, or the point in its... Continue Reading →
