Image by NASA of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy compiling photos from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and the Chandra Observatory
I found this image today on one of my favorite non-photography blogs: "Bad Astronomy" written by Dr. Phil Plait. I'm not really much of an astronomy buff, (though I do like to stare at the night sky for long periods of time), but Dr. Plait's blog is an excellent and highly readable mix of skepticism, science and trivia.I selected this image for today's Not My Image feature because, I mean, really, like....wow. Soooo cool. This is a photo composite of the center of our milky way taken by three very different telescopes: the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra. I won't go through the details, if you are curious about them you can read all about it on Bad Astronomy right HERE.
I will tell you what I like about it. Most importantly is what I mentioned in the title: It is a true merging of art and science. This image will be as interesting to a single-minded scientist with hardly a neuron firing on the right side of his brain as it will be to an artist, writer or photographer. The photo is full of mystery and questions, history and future, violence and incredible beauty, and... {stutters to a stop}.
This past Tuesday I was on a tour of the Goddard Space Flight Center and got to see a piece of Hubble's replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, being tested in the huge clean room they've got there. It was pretty damn amazing. I can't wait to see the images it sends back.
ReplyDeleteApparently, its mirrors are about 5 times larger than the Hubble's, and it will be in a solar orbit outside of Earth's ionosphere (about a million miles out). Where Hubble has given astronomers the ability to look back about 5 billion years into our universe's past, the JWSP will hopefully allow us to gaze almost 12 billion years into the past! One of the engineers working on the guidance systems said their hoping to see what the universe looked like shortly after the stars and galaxies first ignited, only a few dozen million years after the Big Bang. Cool, huh?