The Lazarus Telescope

I have to hand it to the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute. They’ve gone and done it again—bringing a critical part of the system back online after a wild few days of diagnosis. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (one of the telescope’s main “eyes” on the sky) suffered a power supply problem. They took it offline to avoid damage, did some quick tests, and managed to bring it all back late last week.

This episode brought back some memories of the first “fix” the telescope faced. Back when I was first in graduate school, HST had just been launched and scientists were eagerly awaiting the first views through its portals. The bad news of spherical aberration was terrifying, especially considering how much we’d spent on the thing, and how many peoples’ careers were entwined with the instruments onboard (including my advisor’s!).

HST on orbit

Now it’s 16 years later and this venerable telescope is up there still ticking after a few refurbishment and repair missions, and cranking out incredibly great science. My first well-received book (Hubble Vision, now out of print in both editions, but I know you can still find it at Amazon) dealt with the technical issues and also the science as it started coming in.

HST left behind the “techno-flop” label a long time ago. I was glad to see those terrible times end because most of us who were on the teams or knew people on the teams knew that the scope could be made to work. It took a lot of ingenuity and sweat, but it got done.

A chart of HST's targets. Solar system objects are shown as yellow dots; stars are blue; star clusters are orange; nebulae are green; galaxies are red; galaxy clusters are pink; and other targets such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey are the white dots.

I was intrigued to see a chart of where HST has looked in the sky during its years on orbit. It seems to have looked literally in nearly every direction, and out to the most distant reaches of the observable universe. It has made more than 700,000 exposures and looked at more than 22,000 targets.

Despite the accomplishments, HST isn’t out of the woods yet. It is way overdue for a refurbishing mission. This week’s successful shuttle mission may put an HST “upgrade” mission back on the books. We can only hope. This is one darned fine instrument, and it deserves to be brought back to life as often and for as long as we can do it, or until the James Webb Space Telescope is a reality.

Cloud-Be-Gone

I need a star fix. It’s been cloudy or mostly cloudy nearly every night this past week or so. Not so great for stargazing, but better for staying inside and writing. And writing is what I’ve been doing. There are the paid projects, which have me researching everything from cosmic distance indicators to astronomy tutorials. I have a couple of scripts to write, one of them about Mars. And, there’s the writing I do for “fun”—which is usually some sort of blog entry (like this), or short stories that I share with an online writers’ group. So, I keep the old writing muscles flexed.

But, I’d sure like to do some stargazing! I have a great telescope I’d like to drag out and set up and check out some deep-sky objects. Heck, I’d even go with binoculars; just give me a sucker hole in the clouds and I’ll be there!

Speaking of writers, I had the chance to meet a writer last weekend whose work I’ve watched grow and improve over the years. He started out writing as a default when he felt his other career (acting) had come to a standstill, I think. But, the more he wrote, the more he found the muse to suit his nature. I got a copy of his book and read in it that he found his way to writing, only to realize that he’d always wanted to be a writer but had hidden it under the basket of his other ambitions and life goals. That happens. And, it turns out he’s talented at writing because he’s a creative, funny guy and he can get his ideas across really well. He works to improve both his crafts—writing AND acting—and I think he’s doing pretty well.

This is SO unlike some writers who come to the muse wanting to write but not being particularly good at it. (I won’t name names, but I’ve read a few books and heard shows written by people who must have decided that “Oh, anybody can write” and then set out to prove it, only to prove that perhaps anybody CAN write, but only those who are good at it SHOULD write.)

That set me to thinking about my writing career. In sixth grade I remember making a “calling card” that had my name on it, and underneath, the word “Writer.” That was also the year I wrote my first script, an embarrassingly bad little playlet about teenagers in ancient Egypt. I even staged it for my history class project, which was pretty audacious of me. But, it did foretell my eventual entry into script writing. Luckily for the dramaturges of the world, I’ve focused mainly on science documentaries, thus sparing the stage of any further attempts at characterizing people.

Like the fellow above, however, I pursued some other career interests before settling into life as a fulltime writer. They included newspaper reporter, teacher, student, astronomy researcher, and editor. I still do bits and pieces of all of that today, but have found the writing muse the strongest, particularly when I can use it to share astronomy and space science with people.

What Spirit Saw

Well, the clouds are still overhead, and it looks like the stars won’t be out tonight. Which leaves me free to pursue some more writing. For now, I’ll leave you with a great pic from the Mars rover Spirit. At least the skies are clear on Mars!