Showing off What Hubble Does Best

HST on orbit

I just finished work on a planetarium show about Hubble Space Telescope discoveries. I’ve written other shows about HST before, and this is sort of the “latest and greatest” one, and one where I really don’t know the ending. We’ve all been talking about the last HST servicing mission being cancelled, thus sentencing HST to its fate a few years earlier than everybody expected. Now it appears that Congress really does have the last say about this, and several folks have called for a re-investigation of the decision. So, the story’s not over yet. And, up there in orbit around Earth, HST continues on its merry way, sending back great images and science data (not mutually exclusive) for all of us to study and enjoy.

Well, rather than focus on the political aspects of HST’s “human side,” I spend all my time in this planetarium show talking about the great science it has done. It’s not an easy task. There’s a LOT to talk about, and a lot more to come. In fact, the most difficult thing about an HST planetarium show is choosing what NOT to show. There’s only so much time in the program, and in most planetaria, there are only so many slides one can cycle through in the course of a show. Sure we can throw in some video, for those who HAVE video projection capability, but for those who don’t, we’re kind of limited by the slides. I’ve chosen nearly 200 really great images and told a story of cosmic exploration using them as illustration. As I spend time looking at the sights that HST has seen for us, I’m impressed again with just how marvelous this machine has been. And what a wonderful time the astronomers who use it must be having when they open their data sets. Are they like kids opening presents? I like to think so. Or at least HOPE so.

The Eskimo Nebula (planetary nebula)

One of the images I’ll be using in the show is a study of a planetary nebula that lies about 5,000 light-years away from Earth. It’s called “The Eskimo” Nebula because it looks like an intricate furry hood that an Eskimo might wear. The “parka” is really a disk of material surrounding a dying, Sun-like star. Inside the cloud is a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central, dying star. The “face” consists of a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star’s intense “wind” of high-speed material. The story behind this apparition is fascinating. The star that formed this cloud began to lost much of its mass to space about 10,000 years ago. Before that time it had gone through what’s called the “red giant” phase, breathing out a ring of dense material that collected around the star. That ring is actually moving out from the star at about 115,000 kilometers per hour. Hot on its heels (so to speak) are high-velocity stellar winds, moving out from the star at 1.5 million kilometer per hour. They are shoving material above and below the star, creating elongated bubbles. Each bubble is about one light-year long and about half a light-year wide.

This is just one of a dozen or so planetary nebulae I’m presenting in my show, and while I can’t talk about them in excruciating detail, I can at least show people just what our Sun might look like in 5 or 6 billion years when it starts down the path toward planetary nebula-hood. Fun stuff!

Exploring Mars in the Morning

Bounce marks from the rover landing site on Mars

Back when I was a dyed-in-the-wool Mars Undergrounder, dreaming of future missions to Mars I never imagined that one night I’d be sitting here at my computer, doing my taxes and watching along on a live NASA feed along with the Mars Exploration Rover mission folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and many millions of other folks) as the Mars Opportunity craft detached from its orbiter and began the descent to Meridiani Planum. But there I was… and now today I was greeted with the first images from Opportunity, taken on a sunny Mars afternoon not long after it bounced to a stop, deflated its airbags and opened its petals.

It’s quite a lot of fun to explore the surface of Mars in such great detail and apparently it’s caught the attention of some serious VR programmers, like this guy who has mapped a few Mars panoramas into Quicktime Virtual Reality maps you can explore on your own. Check ‘em out! Along with the ongoing stream of images on the NASA sites, these panoramas allow you to check out the rocks, dunes, sand piles, and outcrops that have greeted the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Enjoy the Mars mania while it lasts!

By the way, I’ve added a link to Dr. Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site over in the links bar on the left. It’s fun reading and if you’re interested in debating science, theories, and whatever else catches your fancy, he’s got a forum, too!

Weather: The Bane of Ground-Based Astronomy

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, as seen from the Gemini North observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii

My friend Peter Michaud just sent me this picture after I sent him an email whining about how cold it is here in New England. (It IS cold — subfreezing temperatures, wind chills, snow on the way.) Since he’s in Hawaii, he countered with this little bit of “New England”-type weather out there in the sunny Pacific. Just goes to show you that even in Paradise, the weather can suck, even for stargazers!