Hubble or Bubble?

[simonshack]

I wonder what clowns waste tax payers money with this.

Far cheaper and plausible than the Hubble satellite-telescope, no?

[brianv]

http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry ... rtxt=747NA

[lux]

This guy does his astrophotography from the ground. The results look a lot like the alleged Hubble photos:


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uvZMCiMyuQ

He's using relatively modest equipment (compared to what NASA has access to) -- imagine the results if one has a zillion bucks to spend on gear.

Anyway, if you search the web for "amateur astrophotograpy" you'll find more like this.

[Heiwa]

So today with the right astrophotography equipment installed on my roof terrasse close to Nice, France, I could easily make a picture of the ISS that according below message from NASA just received will pass above my house:

Time: Sun Apr 07/10:05 PM, Visible: 2 min, Max Height: 82 degrees, Appears: SW, Disappears: SW

I will thus just visually check, again, weather permitting, how anything, incl. the ISS, can appear and disappear SW during 2 minutes above me. When NASA told me earlier, several times, that the ISS was passing above I watched and ... sometimes some strange thing up in the sky passed. I really wonder what it could be? A diameter 100 meters lightweight satellite?

[Starbucked]

Historic Vacuum Chamber to Test Webb Telescope !!!


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZB3-6uR4nA

NASA Public Affairs Officer Dan Huot recently visited Johnson Space Center's 400,000 cubic foot vacuum chamber, Chamber A, and spoke with Mary Cerimele, the lab manager for this historic facility.

Upgrades have been made to the facility, which is one of the largest vacuum chambers in the world, to prepare it for testing NASA's deep space James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists plan to use the Webb telescope to see further back into history than ever before.

Chamber A has been used in component tests for Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, space shuttle, International Space Station, Department of Defense communication antennas and various other large-scale satellite systems.

The chamber and its impressive 40-foot diameter door have even been featured in several movies such as "Armageddon" and "Futureworld." As Cerimele jokes, "It's our resident diva."

Since 2007, the chamber has been significantly modified to support testing of the Webb telescope the agency's successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Scheduled to launch in 2018, it will fly in deep space orbit more than a million miles from Earth. To ensure it will function in the extreme environment of space, Chamber A will be equipped with instruments to measure and evaluate the shape and focus of the mirrors.

"Originally the chamber could go to about -300 degrees Fahrenheit," Cerimele points out, "but in order to test the James Webb Space Telescope we need it to operate around -440 degrees Fahrenheit." With its modifications, Chamber A can get much colder than any other facility its size -- and stay that way throughout a 90-day test.

These guys are good!

[Heiwa]

The James Webb Space Telescope 18 segments mirror is fanta(sy)stic!



Each segment weighs only 35 kgs!

The best example of weight reduction is the primary mirror, which takes up a considerable fraction of the total mass budget. The mirror has to be very accurately shaped. Any variations from the perfect shape of the mirror have to be less than a fraction of the observing wavelengths, which start at about 0.1 micrometer (in the ultraviolet) for Hubble and 0.6 micrometer (gold light) for Webb. (For comparison, the average thickness of a human hair is about 100 micrometers.) To keep the mirror in such a perfect shape, Hubble has a thick, solid glass mirror with a mass around 1000 kg (2200 lbs on Earth).
Webb's mirror will consist of 18 thin, lightweight beryllium mirror segments, which will be kept in the right shape and place by a large number of adjustors attached to a stiff backing frame. Including the backing frame, the 18 segments of the Webb primary mirror total about 625 kg. These kinds of technologies, which were not available at the time Hubble was built, will be used throughout Webb.

Source: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/faq.html#whatkind

Furthermore:

The James Webb Space Telescope includes four scientific instruments: the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), and the Fine Guidance Sensor/ Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (FGS-NIRISS).

There is apparently also a big sunshade, i.e. parasol to protect the telescope from the sun:

The large sunshade will protect the telescope from heating by direct sunlight, allowing it to cool down to a temperature below 50 Kelvin (-223° C or -370° F) by passively radiating its heat into space. The definition of the Kelvin temperature scale is that 0 K is "absolute zero," the lowest possible temperature. Water freezes 32 degree F, 0 degree C or about 273 K. The near-infrared instruments (NIRCam, NIRSpec, FGS/NIRISS) will work at about 39 K (-234° C or -389° F) through a passive cooling system. The mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) will work at a temperature of 7 K (-266° C or -447° F), using a helium refrigerator, or cryocooler system.

I really wonder what the space parasol will look like and what it is made of. I cannot see it on the picture of the James Webb Space Telescope:



NASA seems to be unable to clarify!

[simonshack]

So today with the right astrophotography equipment installed on my roof terrasse close to Nice, France, I could easily make a picture of the ISS that according below message from NASA just received will pass above my house:

Time: Sun Apr 07/10:05 PM, Visible: 2 min, Max Height: 82 degrees, Appears: SW, Disappears: SW

Cool, Heiwa!

I will also be standing on my terrace overlooking Rome to watch it pass over my house - one minute after you:

Time: Sun Apr 07/10:06 PM, Visible: 1 min, Max Height: 44 degrees, Appears: WSW, Disappears: W

I'm excited!

[anonjedi2]

http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry ... rtxt=747NA

Brian,

Can you explain what this is?

[lux]

The magic Hubble space telescope which is not only impervious to radiation, meteors and 4500° F of the thermosphere, can now see the invisible! Our illustrious theoretical physicists who have been saying for years (without offering any tangible evidence) that “dark matter” makes up most of our universe, now have the evidence that this invisible substance really exists!

It's all explained is this video which also tells us the story of our universe.

Once upon a time ...

full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ6ep0V0bKM

But, thanks to Einstein, theoretical physicists don't really have to prove anything they say anyway so I don't know why they even bother.

[Libero]

The James Webb Space Telescope 18 segments mirror is fanta(sy)stic!



Each segment weighs only 35 kgs!

The best example of weight reduction is the primary mirror, which takes up a considerable fraction of the total mass budget. The mirror has to be very accurately shaped. Any variations from the perfect shape of the mirror have to be less than a fraction of the observing wavelengths, which start at about 0.1 micrometer (in the ultraviolet) for Hubble and 0.6 micrometer (gold light) for Webb. (For comparison, the average thickness of a human hair is about 100 micrometers.) To keep the mirror in such a perfect shape, Hubble has a thick, solid glass mirror with a mass around 1000 kg (2200 lbs on Earth).
Webb's mirror will consist of 18 thin, lightweight beryllium mirror segments, which will be kept in the right shape and place by a large number of adjustors attached to a stiff backing frame. Including the backing frame, the 18 segments of the Webb primary mirror total about 625 kg. These kinds of technologies, which were not available at the time Hubble was built, will be used throughout Webb.

Source: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/faq.html#whatkind

From Wikipedia on Beryllium

Beryllium is a steel gray and hard metal that is brittle at room temperature and has a close-packed hexagonal crystal structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium


Does anyone else sense any fractals in the proposed build of this mirror assembly? Also, it reminds me of the shape created in this photo.



http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_sage1.htm

[allancw]

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this but here it is:


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-CpP9GgCmA

Don't forget guys, you can see my documentary, Water Time, free, at Banditobooks.com.

[ICfreely]

Did you ever want to process images of the cosmos like real ass-tronomers do? Well, boys & girls, now you can!

http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/ ... rocessing/

According to page 9 of “Introduction to image processing”:

“Sometimes it is necessary to break the ‘rules’ for image processing.”

“When processing raw science images one of the biggest problems is that, to a large degree, you are ‘creating’ the image and this means a colossal freedom within a huge parameter space. There are literally thousands of sliders, numbers, dials, curves etc. to twist and turn.”

“Speaking of right and wrong, there really are no wrong or right images. There are some fundamental scientific principles that should normally be observed, but the rest is a matter of aesthetics — taste.”

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/pr ... essing.pdf

Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules! We can all just ‘Jackson Pollock’ it as we go along. Modern science has truly liberated us…from our own senses. We’re all free. Free to be as dumb as we want to be. There is no right/wrong, good/bad, truth/lie, up/down, left/right or black/white. It’s all just fifty shades of grey. Isn’t it a-maze-ing? Hooray for moral relativism & free-dumb for all. Twist & shout!



http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/smiley ... d=28862099

[memoryhole]

Not sure if this is the right place for this post.

I found this amusing, an artist/photographer/self-proclaimed space geek has been scanning various food stuffs to create space images. Not sure if this guy is purposely poking fun at NASA space images or simply does not see the humour in his work.

http://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/navid- ... ning-food/

The funniest part is the artist's quote on reddit

I was pretty surprised at how realistic it all can look.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ ... _scanning/

His series is called the WANDER space probe.

[Altair]

A couple of years ago I visited the "Museo de las Artes y las Ciencias" at Valencia (Spain). One of the main attractions was an iMax film about the Hubble repair mission. This one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_(film)

It was really impressing. But after skimming this thread, I googled for how an iMax camera looks like and, well, it's not the kind of thing you'd take when repairing a space telescope. In particular, there were lots of close-up takes which I cannot figure at all how could they film - other than in a studio, that is.

[kickstones]

Or in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab.





NASA's Custom IMAX 3D Camera

Testing the rig in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab.

NASA