Backyard Hubble Space Telescope
I was trolling around Flickr today for interesting astronomy pictures and found the one below. Wow.
This is the kind of image excellent equipment gives you (OK, and lots of experience):
Taken with a Takahashi refractor and an SBIG Camera, this image rivals anything I’ve seen come out of NASA.
Excellent work.
Apparently, there is a slight variation in the background of this image due to large nebulae at high galactic latitudes. I couldn’t see it, but if you look at the original version of the image, you’re supposed to be able to see slight variances in background brightness due to these clouds.
I guess these clouds are being termed Integrated Flux Nebulae:
Integrated Flux Nebulae is the term I’ve coined to describe high galactic latitude nebulae that are illuminated not by a single star (as most nebula in the plane of the Galaxy are) but by the energy from the integrated flux of all the stars in the Milky Way. These nebulae clouds, an important component of the Interstellar Medium, are composed of dust particles, hydrogen and carbon monoxide and other elements. (WebSite)
Neat stuff.
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POSTED IN: Astronomy Porn, cosmology
4 opinions for Backyard Hubble Space Telescope
R06u3AP
Feb 9, 2008 at 11:04 am
A very nice picture. However, I have been finding an astounding number of deep-sky objects in, of all things, the Sky feature of Google Earth. I have been placemarking hundreds of spiral and elliptical galaxies, nebulae, colliding galaxies and clusters of galaxies to rival the Hubble Deep Field! And none of them, it seems, have a popular or typical astronomical designation (although I’m sure that there are technical designations to many of them within the scientific astronomical community).
Within the area of the McCrady image alone, for example, I have found around 25 objects in Google Sky that are not readily visible at that image’s scale. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of all that is out there!
Tony, do you know if anyone might have a use for my .kml database of these objects, or are they all pretty much well known by the astronomical community at this point?
Frederica
Feb 9, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I would like to know if there is a possibility to obtain a oversized poster of the HUDF, or this image as shown…. it is simply stunning. Thanks for sharing the cool stuff. :)
Tony
Feb 11, 2008 at 8:49 am
@R06u3AP: As I understand it, Google Sky incorporates data from many sources, including the enormous Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These datasets are so large that noone has seen everything there is to find in them. GalaxyZoo was developed specifically to help classify the tens of thousands of galaxies hidden in there.
While I’m not sure you’ve found anything no one else has ever seen, you’re certainly one of only perhaps a few (or even a dozen) people who have seen them, there’s just too much out there for everyone to have studied it all that close. As to who can use your findings, well, I can’t thing of anyone off the top of my head, but one thing that comes to mind is if you’re interested, you could write about what you’re doing and I’ll be happy to post it here on this blog. At least your efforts could be appreciated by more than just you and me…
Tony
Feb 11, 2008 at 8:58 am
Hi Frederica,
The image I posted wasn’t the HUDF, it was made by an amateur astronomer and you’d have to contact him for permission to print it. The highest res image he has there might be large enough to make a 14×16 or so sized print.
As for the HUDF, there are prints available at Sky and Telescope, but they aren’t poster-sized. You could download the highest res one they have and try to print one yourself though.
Here’s a link to the highest resolution file I know of for the HUDF.
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