Whoa.
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Hard on the heels of The Big Picture’s homage to Hubble comes this one at Geenstijl. These are gorgeous shots. My only complaint? There are only two pix of STIS; one is fuzzy and the other is blocked by the astronauts! Oh well.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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May 21st, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Very nice. I loved watching helmet cam during the repairs. Very cool!
May 21st, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Breathtaking pictures. I was wishing for captions but I suppose they’d have been in Dutch!
We humans really can do some awesome stuff when we put our minds to it.
May 21st, 2009 at 3:33 pm
I can see my house from…oh dang, I already used that joke today.
That picture makes me dizzy. Good thing I’m not an astronaut, or particularly tall.
May 21st, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Hubble’s been operational for how long? 20 years? And not a spot of rust on that chassis. Amazing!
(You’re right: abso-flippin-lutely gorgeous.)
May 21st, 2009 at 3:39 pm
[...] BA Blog recommends: Geenstijl in Dutch, but the large-format Hubble-servicing images are universal. __________________ 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 … [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Has any thought been given to retrieving the Hubble? Surely it is deserving of preservation it is one of the modern wonders of the world.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:24 pm
How am I supposed to know what the pictures are about? All of the descriptions are in Dutch.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:24 pm
This picture is just like the mission: awesome!
May 21st, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Awesome pictures! I particularly like the one of the earth where you can see what look like vortex/anti-vortex pairs in the clouds.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:01 pm
The BA linking to Geenstijl.nl… didn’t think I would live to see that
.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Oh, wow. Gorgeous.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:31 pm
the pics come with this commentary:
Loose translation:
Herschel isn’t in Earth orbit. Neither is Spitzer, but some other telescopes are. Oh well, Geenstijl isn’t exactly a science blog anyway.
May 21st, 2009 at 7:40 pm
I don’t know, Phil, the picture seems pretty credible, to me. On what do you base your claim that the picture is incredible?
(OOOh, I like the comment editing feature.)
May 21st, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Fair dinkum, with the last picture of the astronaut looking in through the port hole I LOL’d. Awesome pictures.
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 am
There are two clear pictures of geographical features. The last one looks like a part of the Galapagos Islands. The other one may be Florida. Does anyone know what they really are?
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:43 am
Absolutely incredible pictures! I don’t know those guys stand out there in space with only a suit between them and certain death. I would freak out!
Its so weird how the stars don’t show up in these photos. Adds an even more errie feel to them.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:05 am
Good quality!
May 22nd, 2009 at 6:24 am
One is Florida – I can see my old house from there! – just a little south of the Cape – and the Bahamas, the other I’m not sure.
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:00 am
And no pics of ACS Repair. Course that’s because they’d have to be helmet-cam snaps, hence low-res. There was a point where NASA TV switched to the outside camera showing the telescope and shuttle with a beautiful Earth backdrop, in full sun, and I thought how sad that John Grunsfeld had to spend the day inside (the aft shroud). I don’t think he minded.
Speaking of ACS Repair, the optimization program will likely be cut short, because the very first test images from the Functional Test are showing the same noise levels as the best we got in ground testing (which Oh By The Way is slightly but significantly lower than the noise ACS had before the failure). Take that, Mr. Murphy! Your law doesn’t apply when you’re up against Frank Cepollina!
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:04 am
You might try checking out the link below to see if they have any better STIS pics…
http://io.jsc.nasa.gov/app/collections.cfm?cid=370&ref=blog
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:23 am
The other picture of the Earth is of the Canary Islands.
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I watched NASA TV during the last 3 days of the repair. It was amazing that I could be so enthralled for so long with so little verbiage. Those spacewalkers and their supporting crew are absolutely incredibly competent people. I sure hope that schools piped the NASA feed to classrooms. This is the kind of inspirational stuff we need to get out.
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:50 pm
If you look really close, there is a round object near the bottom of the picture, between the solar panel and the Telescope. I think that this is proof that….
Oh, wait… never mind. It’s a smudge on my monitor…
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:21 am
Wow! This is a bautiful picture of Hubble
.