Preserved Topic: So what's in a new job ??

Apart from the job itself being just great, I also get to look over some pretty amazing bits of space science ... for any of you who have never visited this site, it's got one of the best collections of space photos ever, and they even describe them for you ... and in the goodies section it even has some of them set up as wallpapers ... Enjoy ... I do !!
http://hubble.esa.int/

Here's a sample ... A photo of stardust

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The Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of a dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Like a flashlight beam shining off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light off the surface of pitch black clouds of cold gas laced with dust.

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Bug-free software only exisits in two places
A programmer's mind and a salesman's lips

[This message has been edited by trib (edited 04-09-2003).]

Waa.. what can I say? Nice goodies. Now I can add my collection

cell 799

Whoa... that is awesome! I definitely think it's about time I changed my wallpaper...

Hey .. glad you liked it ... it's one of our sister sites ... my lot tend to do more on the "huge lists of numbers and unfathomable graphs" sort of space science, but we do also have a team which co-ordinates the European Hubble stuff.

So you are reaching for the stars now... Nice pic.


"Freedom of speech is by no means freedom to insult others" from the Razorart goodbye letter.

So I recently saw a special on Discovery Channel (or some such channel, could have been any one of 3 in my area) talking about the images the Hubble takes. They mentioned that the Hubble actually takes the images in black and white and the color is added later based on something like binary info attached to each picture.

Have you had an opportunity to learn anything about this process? I thought it was a pretty interesting way to do things...

(Oh no, wait... it was on a video we watched in a class I took last semester... can't remember the show it was from though. Dang.)

Bodhi - Cell 617

Actually bhodi, if you follow some of the links beleow my link, you'll find out a lot about the technology. When I get too work this a.m. I'll take a look on the science site (my site) and see if I can find any Hubble technology to complement the PR I posted .... although it will probably be pretty raw tech. info, and bad HTML if I do .... As a starter, on the PR site (link above), take the flash tour of the vehicle, it lets you take it to bits and describes the various instruments.


Bug-free software only exisits in two places
A programmer's mind and a salesman's lips


[This message has been edited by trib (edited 04-10-2003).]

Well Bodhi ... here I am at work .. first cup of coffe for the day and a quick hunt around reveals ...

.... If you visit the URL above, and select "About Hubble" and then "Instruments" you get a fairly good laymans explanation of what's up there and what it's for. IF you REALLY must go all the way ... here is the page containing the instrument and data handbooks for each of the instruments ... but be warned, you'll need to be a physicist to wade though any of it. The site the parent site of that page isn't one of my responsibilities, but it is used by people in the community I service, since it's one of the main focal points for Euro Hubblers in the science community.

Enjoy ...

To answer your question though ... I think they take a series of grayscale images, filtered to extract certain wavelengths, and recombine them ... a bit like an extremely sophisticated version of the red, green, blue channnels in photoshop. Hoever, in the case of the HST they can also do it with "invisible light" like infra-red and ultra-violet. With invisible light, they artificially assign visible colour ranges to represent the various filter "channels" and then do the recombination trick with the visible channels thus created ...

They can also do a lot of other things, like selecting only specific frequency bands (different bands from the same body can give different images) or they can use the data from a couple of high sensitivity spectrophotometers. This will give them a spectrum for objects so dim that optical or digital filtering would just blot out the object. They then apply the collected spectrum to the plain "photographic" results - i.e. they can gather colour information from objects much too dim to give any but a pale gray optical image, and then enhance the intensity of colours in it's personal spectrum, and reapply it to the image to give a "real colour" picture.

erm ... am I making sense ... I ffeel like I'm rambling.




Bug-free software only exisits in two places
A programmer's mind and a salesman's lips

OooOOooo... pretty pictures.....


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spectrophotometers

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Try saying that one 10 times fast!

Trib - the work sounds fascinating! What a dream job to get to play with that stuff all the time! I'm gonna have to spend some time poking around the website thoroughly. Thanks for the brief explanation. It made some sense to me, even though I'm not a physicist!

Thanks for the info. I'll definitely check it out!

Bodhi - Cell 617

what's your job Trib? do you work in the Lab?
nice image...wow....

Technical Webmaster - I run the scientific web site.