TLDR: Yes, Hubble images are real. This series of posts is dedicated to the scrutiny of Hubble imagery and a broader discussion of the veracity of astronomical imagery. In this post, we’ll take a brief look at the history of astrophotography in order to provide a historical context to Hubble.
TLDR: Yes, Hubble images are real. This series of posts is dedicated to the scrutiny of Hubble imagery and a broader discussion of the veracity of astronomical imagery. In this post, we'll look at the distracting image artifacts that are removed when creating press imagery.
What is "true color"? Is it what our eyes see, or is it something else entirely?
We often make the case here that astronomical imagery created to support the dissemination of Hubble’s scientific results to the general public relies on a delicate balance of aesthetics and science. The image above provides a great study in how these two aspects of the image come together in the publication of a press release.... Continue Reading →
Jayanne English, an astronomer with a visual arts background, outlines the process of making an illuminating image for the public from a rich set of research data. Exploring how galaxies change with time requires the study of how visible light and non-visible radiation are interconnected. With the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) we can map, often in... Continue Reading →
Jupiter and Saturn made a big splash last month due to the historic conjunction of our solar system’s two largest planets. From our vantage point here on Earth, looking out onto the flat plane of the sky, a conjunction occurs when two or more celestial bodies seem to slide right past each other in the... Continue Reading →
The Hubble Space Telescope meets the IMAX film format in the creation of an award-winning short feature entitled "Hubble: Galaxies Across Space and Time", available for showing in IMAX theaters worldwide.
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 →
Judy Schmidt is an amateur astronomer and tireless image processor of the Hubble archive. This post details her recent work on the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter for the BBC/Discovery Science Channel's documentary Hubble: Thirty Years of Discovery. Last September I found myself facing an unusual request. I'd just gotten off the phone with... Continue Reading →
It took us 30 years to get to NGC 2020.
