Galileoscope has done its job of winning over young astronomers, and Hubble is keeping them interested. Thank you!

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to start burning stuff down.

I remember reading it as a boy and trying to picture the whole sky full of close bright stars making darkness impossible and giving every object on the ground multiple coloured shadows, and that story was my first introduction to globular clusters. That story had a profound effect on me which lasts to this day. Seeing that picture brought it all back again. Thanks Hubble (and Phil, of course!)

(Edit, to add the bit about coloured shadows!)

“Not nitpicking; just trying to learn here. You refer to “huge lobes of material ejected in a violent outburst from the star over a hundred years ago”. Shouldn’t this be 80 million, 100 years ago?”

Eta Carinae is a star in our own galaxy, “only” 7500 light years away. The 80 million ly figure refers to NGC 6217, not Eta Car. You could however make a case for saying that the gas was ejected ~7600 years ago (100 years + light travel time). It’s generally easier to refer to things at the time they were observed on Earth.

As long as you are consistent (and make clear) which date you’re quoting I guess it doesn’t really matter. Except… that as distance estimates are refined this will affect the “7600 years” figure but not the 100 years figure because the 100 years figure is something that came out of a history book while the 7600 year figure is the result of a calculation and not direct observation. So I guess that’s why astronomers usually go with the history book figure.

@62:

“there are reasons (to do with relativity) to ignore the time taken for light to travel; in effect, simultaneity happens at light-speed.”

In relativity two events that are simultaneous to one observer are not simultaneous to another observer that is moving relative to the first one. Since we are all moving at pretty much zero relative velocity to one another (compared to the speed of light) I don’t think relativity is much of an issue in practice. Personally I can’t see how the phrase “simultaneity happens at light-speed” is even meaningful. Care to try rewording that maybe? Are you talking about the fact that photons experience no proper time? That has nothing to do with simultaneity: NO observer will ever see the two ends of a photon world-line at the same time.

I think that in practice relativity has less to do with dating than having a robust figure that won’t suddenly change with the next distance measurement. All of this is AFAIK, welcoming any corrections.

I was gonna say “Oooh, pretty!”, but that sounds kinda lame in comparison to the images themselves.

You refer to “huge lobes of material ejected in a violent outburst from the star over a hundred years ago”. Shouldn’t this be 80 million, 100 years ago?

I’m not an an astronomer, but I think that astronomers regard things as “happening” when they are observed. If I understand correctly, there are reasons (to do with relativity) to ignore the time taken for light to travel; in effect, simultaneity happens at light-speed.

Me? Imagine what?

I can imagine quite a lot!

Wonderful pictures. Hubble is one of mankind’s great achievements; and its trials and tribulations have only made it more so.

The Hubble Space Telescope observatory, in my opinion, is the greatest explorer in human history bringing more new places and showing us more of the cosmos we live in than any explorer ever before – and all in a peaceful scientific manner where no-one gets hurt and everyone on the Earth can enjoy the marvellous glorious results of its work. I second Trebuchet’s line there.

@ 20. Sili Says:

The real Greatest Show on Earth! (wink goes here)

There you go!

Although some picky pedants might nitpick and say the show is all off the Earth instead!

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BTW. Sili – just in case you don’t already know this, you create the wink emoticon automatically by typing ; – ) without the spaces in-between. Similarly : -) gives you a smiley emoticon & 8 ) w/o space gives you .

Eta Carinae is the most mind-boggling superlative star & my personal favourite.

In historic times as seen in our skies it went from a medium brightish star to surpassing Canopus and rivalling Sirius for brightest night-time star honours then fading away beyond the range of our unaided eyes and is now brightening once more with its searing starlight blazing through the clouds it cast off back in the 1850′s. ( As we count it anyway.)

Eta Carinae is staggeringly superluminous – five million, (yes, five million, 5 with six zeroes after it!) times as bright as our Sun and one of the heavyweight champions of our Galaxy weighing in at an estimated one hundred and twenty or so times our Sun’s mass. It is a Luminous Blue Variable, seven thousand five hundred light years away and a cosmic lighthouse visible halfway across the Milky Way. It will become even brighter still hitting levels that exceeed all superlatives when it goes supernova some night in the future. It has ejected a vast beautiful nebula and the massive lobes spotted by HST there.

That spectra is awesome – that camera is awesome and I have just one word to say to the BA for his superb work there & his blog here :

Thankyou.

PS. And the other images there are breath takingly magnificent as well. Love it.