There is nothing more amazing than pictures from a telescope! Hubble and other high-quality astronomical optical instruments capture the target at a glance and record what they see. Compared to them, the Lunar Bulk Module is just a crude contraption designed to land on another world. Any missile is a fast attack vehicle. The world-famous automatic observatory in orbit around the Earth is a man-made eye that carefully and tirelessly examines the vast Universe.
It's all about him
For the first time, an artificial eye peered into the black depths without end and edge immediately after the launch on April 24, 1990. After a quarter of a century of honest service, it became clear: the Universe is richer, more beautiful and more complex than the wildest scientific assumptions represent.
But relatively recently, people hardly imagined that they could take clear pictures of the solar system. With the Hubble telescope, the impossible became possible. Withoutsmall thirty years bright silver object, 43 feet (13 m) in diameter and 14 feet (4.2 m) long, with an eye wide open at one end and an "eyelid" that never closes, continuously and carefully scans the expanses of space.
About unexplored lands on Earth they say "no man has set foot here". It is possible that thanks to the research of scientists based on the data of the “celestial laboratory”, a person will one day not only consider other worlds, but also walk on the surface of habitable planets in distant galaxies.
Went out, saw, fixed
What are telescope pictures? Hubble is not just a device for capturing still images in space. A complex sky station collects data in a special way, registers electromagnetic radiation, in which the earth's atmosphere is opaque.
The device, named after the famous astronomer and cosmologist Edwin Hubble, captures the radiation ranges of stars, ionized particles, reflected light. Astronomers process the data, reducing it to a visual image.
The $1.5 billion novelty was created by several companies. The American military-industrial corporation Lockheed made a special contribution. There were many problems and difficulties, but in the end, a device appeared that changed astronomy almost from the moment it went into space. Hubble's high-resolution imagery was expected to produce crisp, detailed images that would bring humans closer to unraveling the mysteries.universe.
Sanded but not polished
Perkin Elmer's iconic 94.5 inch (2.4 m) primary mirror was polished to within 10 nanometers (10 one-millionths of a meter), reducing distortion to 1/50 of the thickness sheet of paper.
Since the Space Shuttle Discovery launched a marvel of scientific thought into orbit, it has had many dramatic incidents. One of the most critical happened at the beginning, when it turned out that the Hubble telescope could not take images of space of the required quality, since the sharpness turned out to be an order of magnitude lower than the calculated one. A microscopic defect in an improperly polished mirror resulted in an unacceptable image error.
Space Repair
It was urgent to take action. Putting in a new mirror when the hulk is already in orbit? Excluded. To lower the device to Earth? Expensive pleasure. We decided to compensate for the distortion using the COSTAR system. The astronauts installed it during the first expedition to maintain a celestial observatory, plus they replaced the camera.
Figuratively speaking, the most expensive "glasses" in history were put on the "cosmic eye". After 2009, they were no longer needed - devices with self-correcting optics (spectrographs) appeared. The best pictures of the Hubble telescope are not just a story about the secret of the universe. This is a fantastic gallery of the works of the greatest Creator.
Fireworks, turntables, sadness
The "fireworks in the sky" captured by Hubble has about 2,000 young stars sparkling at a distance of 20,000 light-years. A huge cluster of three thousand stars in the huge constellation Carina is called Westerlund 2 (1). The large planetary nebula "Snail" (2) in the constellation Aquarius (two and a half years across) is also called the "Eyes of God". The red color of the “pupil” is a display of gas blowing from a dead sun-shaped star. The "eye" is only 690 light-years away.
High-quality images from the Hubble telescope revealed the beauty of the object adorning the Pinwheel Galaxy called Mesier 101 (3). The spiraling miracle is 25 million, from one end to the other one hundred and seventy thousand light-years. Our Milky Way is impressive in size, but Messier 101 is twice the size, although it looks very flat on its face. Pronounced spiral arms and a small dense bulge (the central ellipsoid component of spiral and ellipsoid galaxies) are clearly visible.
Pillars, head, Jupiter
No doubt, the pictures of the planets from the Hubble telescope are beautiful. But even more wonderful are the surreal processes of the death and birth of galaxies, the echoes of catastrophes that happened millions of years ago. Take, for example, these "cosmic snakes" in the Orion Nebula - the so-called Pillars of Creation (4). Terrible accumulations of hydrogen gas - a kind of egg, brand new stars "hatch" inside. Approximately 6 thousand years ago, the pillars were destroyed by a supernova explosion. Gradually dissipating picture will beobserved for another thousand years.
"Horse's Head" (5) in the constellation of Orion. The famous nebula was photographed in exceptional detail in 2013, when the Hubble telescope turned 23 years old. The glow is caused by the ionization of hydrogen clouds behind the object. But as if several moons cast shadows on Jupiter (6). The black spots that you see are not shadows, but the largest satellites of the fastest planet in the solar system - Io, Ganymede and Callisto.
Crabs, eyes and rings
The giant mosaic of the Crab Nebula (7) is what remains of a star that died in a supernova explosion. On Earth, a flash was observed in 1054, in Taurus (there are reports of Chinese astronomers about this phenomenon). The Cat's Eye (8) is a nebula in the constellation Draco. Before us is the last, very bright phase of a star resembling the Sun. Studying the current process, astronomers suggested that in 5 billion years our star will also enter the same state.
Images from the Hubble telescope allowed us to determine the true shape of the Ring Nebula (9). This part of the constellation called Lyra is located at a distance of 2,000 light years. It is believed that the dust spirals imitate the Starry Night painting by Vincent van Gogh. As for more mundane comparisons, with the help of the apparatus they found out: the sparkling gaseous shell around the obsolete old one resembles a donut with filling (matter), and not a bagel.
Shift is being prepared
The Whirlpool Galaxy (10) in the constellation Canes Venatici demonstrates the birth of newstars. It is 23 million light years away. The dust at the center feeds the black hole. This is how two interacting cosmic beauties-galaxies Arp 273 (11) look like: the shape of the larger one is distorted due to tidal interaction with the smaller one. Simply put, one galaxy almost swallowed another. Marvelous, fantastically beautiful, this “Rose of galaxies” appears before the eyes of earthlings. The larger one shows an expressive flower form. But these are no longer "flowers, but berries" - a beautiful image of a terrible cosmic catastrophe that occurred as a result of a collision of two galaxies.
Two more galaxies NGC 2207 and IC2163 passing critically close to each other in the constellation Canis Major (12). The consequences of this mutual "ramming" will last for hundreds of millions of years. One image resembles ships at sea. Others say they see "the burning eyes of the Hound of the Baskervilles." Thanks to the unique "video mining" of the most complex devices, there are more than a dozen comparisons!
The time will come when the first "swallows" - pictures from the Hubble telescope - will stop coming to Earth. An ultra-modern orbital infrared observatory is being created, which is named after the second head of NASA, James Webb. The design of the device significantly exceeded the budget, the implementation deadlines were violated. Something similar happened with the "hard worker" who was preparing to go on a well-deserved rest. But while it works, NASA scientists will surprise the world more than once with stunning images of stunning space phenomena.
