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Author Topic: The Universe is More Than Beautiful
Teshi
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Here's link to one of the most stunning photographs I have ever seen, one created to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the Hubble space telescope: it's the Carina Nebula.

The link goes to the article, which gives varying sizes of links, from the astonishingly large (500MB) to more reasonably sized. Big or small, it is a stunning picture of the birth of stars.

This picture illustates for me how absolutely beyond beautiful the universe is. Here's to being part of all that.

[Smile]

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vonk
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Wow, that is stunning. It's almost hard to believe it wasn't digitally manipulated. Great jarb universe!
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katharina
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quote:
This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of ionized hydrogen. Colour information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.


It is a lovely picture, but it is digitially manipulated. [Smile]
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vonk
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Ah! Good to know. I meant more along the lines of 'created in photoshop' digitally manipulated. That is more of using digital tools to create a representation of what the phenominon looks like. Still awesome though!
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Teshi
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Colour is only one way to percieve things. Yes, it's been manipulated, but only to make it more representative to human eyes. The shapes and stars and complexities are the same.

[Smile]

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mr_porteiro_head
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"Star birth in the extreme"

20XD6?

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brojack17
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This is one of my favorite photos. The size really bakes my noodle. To think that each one of those bright points of light is a star like our sun (some bigger some smaller). WOW!
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vonk
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"Pillars of Creation"

Awesome. I want a Pillar of Creation. Or maybe a row of them on the front of my Victorian style home.

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The Pixiest
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I read an article a few months ago that the pillars of creation had already been destroyed by a supernova and the light just hasn't reached us yet.

I don't remember how they said they knew that.

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vonk
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So, if the Pillars of Creation have been destroyed, what does that portend? Something doomsday-ish, I'd think.
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orlox
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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070110-pillars-creation.html
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Kwea
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I love Hatrack.


Thanks for the pics, guys.

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Morbo
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That is a very beautiful picture, Teshi.
Hoag's object, a beautiful ring galaxy.

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Tatiana
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I love astronomy pictures! Hubble is amazing.

Here are several nice ones that I've collected over time.

Most of these came from the astronomy picture of the day site that NASA puts up. It's so awesome! I check it every single day. [Smile]

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Launchywiggin
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I found it very disillusioning to find out that all those Hubble images are digitally manipulated to add color and shadow and pretty-ness.


*sigh*

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Morbo
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I think adding beauty is usually just a side-effect of the photo editing. Astronomers do study these pictures-- false-color imaging, layering of data from different spectra, and other similar techniques are accepted methods in furthering understanding.
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Tarrsk
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They aren't (manipulated to add pretty-ness, that is)- the false-color editing is what makes the images useful in the first place. Would you say that black and white photographs are disillusioning because they don't show the true colors of their subjects, as well?
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Tatiana
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Also, there's really no alternative to showing stuff that's infrared or ultraviolet, radio frequency, or whatever in false color. Humans can't see radio waves, so they have to depict them using colors that we *do* see. But plenty of the pictures of galaxies, planets, nebulae, etc. ARE in true color. Just not all of them. There's a lot more information available than what happens to fall in the visible spectrum. [Smile]

But I do prefer real color images myself, so I understand what you mean. I want to know what the thing actually *looks* like.

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Orincoro
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quote:
Originally posted by Launchywiggin:
I found it very disillusioning to find out that all those Hubble images are digitally manipulated to add color and shadow and pretty-ness.

*sigh*

Unfortunately virtually every image you have ever seen of an astronomical object has been altered and enhanced substantially. All those beautiful fields of galaxies they were so fond of showing on the local news when Hubble first started imaging.... I believe a large portion of the content in those pictures was interpolation. Same goes for images from Galileo, they were reconstructed from highly pixelated digital images.

Edit: Actually this history of the Galileo images is fascinating. There were endless technical problems and the craft ended up taking many times more images than it had the capacity to return to Earth. The craft's memory core was actually a wound magnetic tape!

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Tatiana
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But do understand that astronomy pictures aren't enhanced just for artistic effect, but in order to bring out all the information that's there and make it visible. Astronomers are trying to figure out what all the stuff is and how it's behaving, so they fool with the pictures to get them to clearly show what is actually there. It's not like they're using them as starting points for inventing pretty scenes, which would be seriously disappointing to me, for one.
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0Megabyte
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So, does anybody have any sources for true-color pictures of things in the universe?

I mean, these pictures are totally awesome, sure.

But I want to see some true color ones, too.

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fugu13
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I don't think most of them would be visible. As noted, most of these pics are taken outside the visible spectrum.
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Tatiana
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If you click on the "I've" in my post above of May 3 with all the links, that's a true color picture of Jupiter's cloudtops. The true color ones are mixed in with the others. You just have to read the captions in their original contexts to see which are which.

One other factor in looking at deep sky stuff (like other galaxies) is that they're usually really faint so the camera that takes pictures of them leaves the shutter open a long time to collect more light. What that means is that you wouldn't usually see as much if you just looked through a telescope with your eye. Of course if you were closer to the object it wouldn't be so faint, and so it would probably look something like the way it's pictured, in that case.

There's no substitute for just looking through a telescope at the sky, though. For some reason that's a million times more exciting than looking at pictures. I'm not sure why but everyone seems to feel it. To just point and look is really amazing. I mean, that stuff is actually up there. In the sky. And you can just look at it. [Smile]

Check out Saturn's rings some time, or the craters on the moon, or the crescent of Venus, or Jupiter's moons, or globular clusters. It's all so so cool! [Smile]

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0Megabyte
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huh. Wow. It still looks quite amazing!
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Tatiana
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The apod today is a star cluster in visible light. I thought I would post it for 0M to see. [Smile]
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Morbo
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The apod for the 5th is a good example of what we've discussed:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070505.html

The main image of the Sombrero Galaxy is a composite from visible, infrared and x-ray instruments.

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Tatiana
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I couldn't find the interesting space related news thread, so I will be lazy and post this here. They've found a black hole that spins at the theoretical limit, the fastest a black hole can possibly spin, according to relativity. The Sky and Telescope article tells more about it, and how they know. I thought that was pretty neat, even if the picture isn't really pretty enough to post in this thread. [Smile]
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ClaudiaTherese
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Neat indeed. [Smile]
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