When I worked on the Hubble Space Telescope mission, I made a lot of images from Hubble data that revealed amazing landscapes of space. You can see these images at HubbleSite. Aside from the remarkable colors, resolution and sharpness of the images, one of their other defining characteristics was how small a piece of the... 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 →
Every two years or so, Mars and the Earth approach each other more closely than usual. We're in no danger of colliding because both planets are kept in their orbits by the Sun's gravity. But the orbital geometry gives us an opportunity to get a closer and brighter view of our nearest neighboring planet from... Continue Reading →
The Lagoon Nebula We here at Hubble Image Central (a.k.a. the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute), along with the entire Hubble Space Telescope team, love to celebrate the anniversary of our favorite orbiting telescope's launch on April 24, 1990 by releasing a new picture. This year we're happy to present... Continue Reading →
The most common question we get asked about Hubble images is, "are the colors real?" What folks usually mean is, are these what the images would look like if we could travel in the Starship Enterprise to these cosmic landscapes? Or maybe more practically, if we could look through the Hubble Space Telescope. That would... Continue Reading →
In 1998, a few years after the launch and the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, a number of astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute established the Hubble Heritage project. The main goal, among others, was to promote the visual qualities of Hubble images balanced with their science content. Over the years since, Heritage... Continue Reading →
This image, the M31 Deep Field, may not look like much. It doesn't have the bold colors and dynamic composition of many Hubble images. Yet it's one of my favorite images because of what we can see if we look a little harder. In fact it shows nothing less than the entire sweep of the... Continue Reading →
Illuminated Universe is a blog from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) dedicated broadly to discussing visualization in astronomy but also focused on providing some background to images and videos. STScI is responsible for the science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Part of our mission is to inform... Continue Reading →
