Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: How Hubble Brought Color to the Universe- WNYC

Monday, January 19, 2015

How Hubble Brought Color to the Universe- WNYC

HOW HUBBLE BROUGHT COLOR TO THE UNIVERSE

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Thursday, January 15, 2015

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"The Pillars of Creation," a detail view of the Eagle Nebula (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

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This April the Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 years old. While Hubble has helped astronomers make important scientific discoveries, it’s most famous for the beautiful photographs it’s produced of outer space. And while the technology that created these images was groundbreaking when Hubble was launched into orbit in 1990, Hubble also pioneered a style of space photography that was just as revolutionary.

Elizabeth Kessler, an art history professor at Stanford University, has written a book about the aesthetics of the Hubble images, Picturing the Cosmos. Kessler says before Hubble, most photographs of space were in black and white. Color photos from the Voyager missions in the 70s and 80s were psychedelic, Kessler explains, with vivid, electric colors. Hubble’s photos look more like the shades we might see in a landscape of the Southwest. Skies tend to be blue, celestial bodies in reds and yellow. So a jet of gas unimaginably large looks like a dramatic outcropping of rock at a national park. That’s not an accident. Hubble’s photos are created by human image processors from gigabytes of data, and those specialists make aesthetic choices that make the cosmos look more familiar.

New photos from Hubble still light up the internet, but NASA has stopped all missions to repair the telescope. When it stops functioning, NASA will steer it back and let it fall into the sea. But work has begun on the James Webb Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2018. Astronomers hope the Webb telescope will give us more clues into the birth of the universe — and, of course, take pretty pictures.

Special thanks to Felice Frankel and Dr. David DeVorkin.

Slideshow: Photographs from the Hubble Telescope

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA

This cloud of gas and dust is a large portion of the Eagle Nebula, a dense star-forming region. Released in 2005, this photo from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a spire that is approximately 57 trillion miles high — about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star. (Click here to enlarge)