I was scrounging around on the Web reading science news earlier today and ran across an announcement that Hubble Space Telescope is back up and running and science observations are resuming (presumably starting last night (Saturday)). This is good news for all the astronomers who are lined up waiting to use the telescope. The first post-switchover image should be posted sometime in this coming week. Here’s one of HST’s greatest hits from 2007 to tide you over until the science starts flowing again. Explore!
Thousands of sparkling young stars are nestled within the giant nebula NGC 3603. This stellar jewel box is one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. It lies about 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy. Courtesy NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Collaboration.
Back in my grad school days my officemates and I decided to take up skiing as a respite from the heavy workload and stress of first-year studies. We formed what became known as the “Klingon Ski Team” and our charge was to “ski with honor!” The University of Colorado was within an hour or two’s drive of several decent ski areas, and so we skiied with honor as best we could, hardly missing a weekend except during the December holidays, when the slopes were packed with tourists.
Cairo Sulcus on Enceladus, taken by Cassini's narrow-angle camera. Image size is 1024 x 1024; scale is 10 meters per pixel.
I was reminded of those heady days of Klingon sitzmarks and fearless mogul-jumping when I saw this image of the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus in the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” section yesterday.
These ridges and folds are actually wrinkles in the icy crust and some of those chunks of ice are a couple of hundred meters across. This place would provide some incredible ski runs, if you could figure out a way to get there and get the appropriate ski gear (including oxygen tanks and life-support suits) and find a chopper to drop you for some extreme outer solar system skiing. Klingons would do it!
