What is "true color"? Is it what our eyes see, or is it something else entirely?
What Color Is Mars?
The Fading Stingray: A Case Study in Science and Aesthetics
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 →
Guest Post: The Yin and Yang of the Visible and Invisible in Spiral Galaxies
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 →
What’s Up with Jupiter and Saturn?
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 →
Making a Short, but Very Large, Movie
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.
Fields of View
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 →
Guest Post: A New Take on a Comet’s Impact for Hubble’s 30th
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 →
Hubble’s 2020 vision
It took us 30 years to get to NGC 2020.
Surfing the Cosmic Reef
This blog post is one in a series marking the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. For more information and resources regarding Hubble’s 30th anniversary, please visit hubblesite. Thirty years is a long time. In fact, thirty years is roughly the span of a generation. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that an... Continue Reading →
Hubble Gives Us a Front Row Seat to the Universe
This blog post is one in a series marking the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. For more information and resources regarding Hubble’s 30th anniversary, please visit hubblesite. This particular post by Ray Villard also relates to a series of articles available here. Since its launch in April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has... Continue Reading →