Comments on: Hubble’s Anniversary

By: The Bad Astronomer

The Bad Astronomer — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:15:42 +0000

Normandy, you mean the planetary nebula paper? It took a while to analyze the data (two months, maybe) and then more time to write the text. We submitted it to the journal, and it was initially rejected! The referee said there was not enough new material in the paper. Ironically, we submitted it specifically as what’s called a “research note”: something interesting, but not ground-breaking enough to warrant a full-sized paper in a journal. We appealed to the editors, and they agreed with us. They overruled the referee and the paper was published. I still think it was pretty cool, and I’m glad it got out there.

The central star of that nebula was 26th magnitude: the faintest star you can see with your eye at night is 100 million times brighter! Yet you could see that star easily in a single 400 second exposure. STIS was a great instrument.

By: Normandy6644 (Dave)

Normandy6644 (Dave) — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 05:20:17 +0000

Why was the delay so long on the publication of that paper? It looks like about a year!

By: Jorge

Jorge — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 20:30:38 +0000

actually it was a which is a newline, but who cares? its fixed
glad to help :p

By: The Bad Astronomer

The Bad Astronomer — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:51:14 +0000

Nuts; an extra space was added by the software in that link. I fixed it, thanks.

By: Jorge

Jorge — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:03:11 +0000

The link to the movie is a mess,
here is a cleaned up version:
http://www.cnn.com/resources/video.almanac/1990/hubble/hubble.large.21sec.mov

By: Wayne

Wayne — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 11:32:32 +0000

Thanks for replying to my original post, Phil. This one’s more on-topic rather than picking faults.

There’s a cool repository of STIS parallels at:
http://www.stsci.edu/instruments/parallels/retrieve.html which scientists are still working with, STIS’ untimely death doesn’t mean it doesn’t continue to make discoveries. Highly efficient use of the orbital resources, which Phil writes about here:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bitesize/parallel.html
His usual easy on beginners, easy to read, informative style makes a good introduction to STIS and the parallels.

Michelle Rochon: The James Webb Space Telescope is in planning but unlikely to become operational until 2011. Read more: http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/

By: monolitfoo

monolitfoo — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 05:56:33 +0000

Thank you, both for ‘Bad Astronomy’ and all the work with Hubble. I gotta spoil a bit and say what I’d like is better access to space so that we could have a dozen hubble’s. Furthering NASA and the shuttle fiasco just seems like throwing lives and money away. Not to mention that at the cost of the ‘Robotic Rescue’ mission we should be able to get four or five hubbles aloft. I know it’s HARD WORK, but NASA seems especially skilled in making things ten times harder.