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Hubble Captures Crisp New Image of Jupiter and Europa
- Johnny87 6y agoLooks like a painting. How cool is it that we actually have the technology to finally see these odd planets!?
- dylan604 6y agoFor a few hundred years now, we've been looking at the planets. Finally makes it sound like we just did this yesterday or within current life times.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoFor the past few hundred years until recently, we've been seeing bright and fuzzy dots. There's a difference between that, and ~640000 square pixels worth of details we see in the article.
- pengaru 6y agoHubble is not new.
- wahern 6y agoI think we've had really good views of Jupiter for awhile. The Great Red Spot was identified over 300 years ago and tracked consistently for over 100 years. But Jupiter is huge so it's fairly easy to see in relatively good detail.
- Kattywumpus 6y agoI think about this a lot. We are the first people in human history to see the planets up close, so to speak. For thousands of years, humans stared up at the sky and watched these luminous dots change position over time. They made up stories about them, tracked them, designed instruments to turn these blurry, luminous dots into slightly-less-blurry luminous dots. But in this long human journey of thousands of years, we are the first generation to actually see these dots of light as the worlds they are. Us. You and me. So many thousands of years of ancient dreaming and wondering, going all the way back to our hominid ancestors, gazing at the night sky in wordless wonder. And we, our generation of humans, are the culmination of this journey of imagination. What they could only imagine, we know. For the first time in history, in my lifetime, we've visited every planet in the solar system. Any planet you see in the sky? We have photos of it. We've mapped its surface, or visited it directly. You want to know what sunset on Mars looks like? You don't have to guess. We take this all for granted. I don't think we even appreciate the legacy we inherited. It feels like there should be a Planet Day, where we all celebrate the knowing. Where we symbolically link hands with our ancestors across time, with everyone who ever squinted up at all the little sparkles on the big black ocean and wished they knew what they were. A day when everyone looks at at least one photograph from every celestial body we've seen, and appreciates the gift we've been given. And then maybe looks at the best photos we have of exoplanets, and realizes that we are in the same position today that our hominid ancestors were, wondering what these places will someday turn out to be, and who we will be when we finally know them.
- dylan604 6y agoThese images are amazing, but I do feel that we as a society just sort of take them for granted now. However, I would highly recommend finding a local star party in your area. There is nothing like putting your eyeball on a telescope and seeing things for yourself. Yes, it will not be nearly as detailed as NASA images, but it will still impress. For all of those made up stories you mentioned, I shed a tear every time I hear modern day things like flat earthers. We still have not gotten away from made up stories. > You want to know what sunset on Mars looks like? You don't have to guess. Sadly, people on the west coast have seen it in person.
- boxfire 6y agoFun fact: sunsets on Mars are blue.
- dontcarethrow2 6y agoThis would be beautiful, but we need to be able to see the night sky first. Having moved to a large city from a tiny one, no one notices/even cares to look up here. there isnt much to see, I think that makes it meaningless to those who havent stared at a full clear night sky, no light pollution for miles. I'm jealous even with all the comforts you get here, you can't see that image our ancestors got to stare at almost every night(cloud factor).
- billforsternz 6y agoI looked at the Jupiter and Saturn with a modest 14 inch telescope last week https://www.darkskyproject.co.nz/tours/crater-experience/ https://www.darkskyproject.co.nz/tours/crater-experience/ The two planets themselves, and the four large moons of Jupiter and of course the rings of Saturn were all very visible, and this kind of old school technology has been available for hundreds of years. But basically I agree, Hubble and robot planetary exploration are awesome.
- mangamadaiyan 6y agoHow times have changed that a 14" telescope is "modest" :) My first was a 50mm refractor, and I used a 5" Maksutov for the longest time before settling down with an 8" Dob. An 18" truss-tube Dob is in the works.
- seesaw 6y agoThis is a good month to watch Jupiter from the northern hemisphere. I was able to get a good view of the four moons using a binocular, fern with a lot of light pollution.
- pkaye 6y agoHow good is the nighttime visibility in New Zealand given its a somewhat isolated island? Here is California I would have drive somewhere out far for it to be dark enough.
- justinator 6y agoIt's absolutely insane. It's not just a starry night - it's as if the sky is DRIPPING with stars. Why even go to sleep?
- lostlogin 6y agoWhere about are you looking from?
- billforsternz 6y agoI live in a smallish city (200K to 500K population, depending on how you define the city bounds). I just stepped out (it's 11pm here) and looked up (it's not normally something I think about). It's pretty reasonable, you can definite see stars by the thousands, some of them very bright. The air here is very clear for city air. Out in the country it's definitely better though. The excursion I linked to was in a very isolated area, the Mackenzie Basin in Canterbury. The local authorities there have picked up this particular ball and are running with it. Recognising that they don't have much light pollution anyway, they have set about minimising what light pollution there is (eg street lighting points down, in general they try to avoid unnecessarily leaking light up). It does make for a genuinely impressive sky on a clear night. The excursion was great. The bus takes you to a very isolated spot, and they give you plenty of dark time to get your night vision working well. Recommended. The youngsters who were acting as tour guides were both from the Northern Hemisphere and they made a point of talking up the Southern sky, saying in general it is more interesting. I don't know much about astronomy and can't judge, but they made a good case. I had no idea that Alpha Centauri is only visible in this hemisphere for example. Maybe astronomy would be a good hobby. It "feels" more profound than chess, C++ programming, and the intersection of the two :- )
- _Microft 6y agoIf you have a DSLR or similar camera (the lens/objective that comes with DSLRs is usually good enough) and a tripod, you can even photograph moons (plural!) of Jupiter yourself! To avoid disappointments, I must set expectations correctly, though: they will be no more than a few tiny white dots next to a brighter dot (Jupiter itself) but either way: you will have photographed moons of a different planet all by yourself! Edit: a few tips if you would like to try: make sure to use a tripod, as holding the camera is not going to work. A delayed release or remote release helps a lot because tiny movements of the camera while pressing the release will show in the image. Don't choose the exposure time too long as this will make Earth's rotation visible. The results are not going to be great but knowing that these are actual moons, hundreds of millions of kilometers away, will be a nice thing anyways.
- wiredfool 6y agoYou can get the moons of Jupiter with a cellphone held up to a small telescope or binoculars.
- java-man 6y agoFor one Hubble, something like a dozen of Keyhole spy telescopes have been launched [0]. Just imagine the kind of science we would have gotten if we launched a dozen of Hubbles instead... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
- hirundo 6y agoSo about the ratio of non-selfies to selfies.
- Yetanfou 6y agoImagine if those satellites were never made, we wouldn't have had the Hubble space telescope either.
- RobertoG 6y agoWhat that says about us, I'm not sure if I want to know.
- xwdv 6y agoWe’re more interesting.
- vibrolax 6y agoHaving large rockets to launch anything for non-military purposes is a byproduct of the requirement by the military of several nations for the capability to deliver thermonuclear warheads on their adversaries.
- Yetanfou 6y agoIt says that we're part predators, part prey animals and as such are more interested in defending our territory and possibly gaining some new territory than we are in gazing at the skies for some purpose which neither the predator nor the prey would recognise. Hard science is a new thing in evolutionary terms, the purpose for which those KH satellites were launched is as old as our species.
- filearts 6y agoI would love to see an image like that combined with a depth map to allow us to move it around and get a sense of the vertical scale of those storms!
- dylan604 6y agohttps://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21107/juno-s-first-slice-of-jupiter https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21107/juno-s-first...
- rement 6y agoHere is an image of Earth compared to the biggest storm on Jupiter [1] (from 2006). Jupiter is big. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot#/media/File:Jupiter,_Earth_size_comparison.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot#/media/File:Jup...
- dmreedy 6y agoIt never occurred to me that the Great Red Spot would be shrinking. It's logical that storm systems are dynamic (and finite) things, but I find it striking that in another hundred years, people may never think of Jupiter as having such a dramatic feature. And who knows what new ones may have developed. I suppose that's as much a commentary on how short a time we've been able to witness these phenomena as more than dots in the sky. Especially relative to the timescale they operate on.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoI suppose you’ve never seen this: https://i.ibb.co/p1W2Cd0/a.gif https://i.ibb.co/p1W2Cd0/a.gif And I suppose you never will, because I’m shadowbanned. Too bad for you. Too bad for everyone.
- adolph 6y agoAs far as the history of it, early sightings may have been other storms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot
- cmehdy 6y agoOn a much longer timescale but still within habitability of the Earth (theoretically..), Saturn's rings will also disappear[0]. (300 million years) [0] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/794/nasa-research-reveals-saturn-is-losing-its-rings-at-worst-case-scenario-rate/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/794/nasa-research-reveals-...
- jcims 6y agoI wish they would send something like the Cassini spacecraft to Jupiter. Just gobs and gobs of eye candy until the sensor gets nuked to bits.
- dylan604 6y agoYou mean like Juno? https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html
- commonturtle 6y agoMan, I'd love to be able to get a really high resolution print of this framed so I can hang it in my living room.
- holler 6y agothat'd be really cool! it's an amazing photo
- dylan604 6y agoImages hosted by NASA are available to make prints from. Tax dollars funded the images, so the images are made available to the public. If it is hosted from somewhere else where they took the data from NASA and did their own work on it, there could be copyright issues protecting their work. So, find all of the amazing images you like made available by NASA's, and then make your own posters!
- aaronblohowiak 6y agoYour tax dollars at work: https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2020/42/4739-Image https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2020/42/4739-Im...
- sq_ 6y agoI always wish that it was a little easier to find the pages with high resolution downloads of all these amazing NASA telescope and rover images. It'd be great if they could create one central repository that all of them would go to for people to look through.
- addled 6y agohttps://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/ https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/ Is pretty good. Can filter by mission, instrument, or target. Resolution is kind of hit or miss, as a lot of it is raw or minimally processed, but that is part of the fun.
- 6y ago
- holler 6y agoWhat are the odds in our lifetime there will be a probe sent into orbit and then down into the atmosphere with high-resolution cameras that can beam back imagery/video of the entire trip? I think it'd be fascinating to see what it's like both above and while descending through the clouds. Also, is it possible life could exist in the clouds similar to how we now speculate on Venus?
- dylan604 6y agoI imagine it would be as un-spectacular as flying in a plane through clouds. Nothing to see. It would be that all the way to the point the camera melted and/or crushed.
- holler 6y agoperhaps but I would think the descent before entering the clouds would have plenty to look at..
- elihu 6y agoVideo from a low orbit satellite could be pretty spectacular. Especially if it's in a polar orbit and can see in whatever wavelength is necessary to see the weird geometrically symmetrical storms at the poles.
- dylan604 6y agohttps://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/videos/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/videos/index.html
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aaronblohowiak 6y agoCheck out "space diving" https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/25/358820835/-near-space-dive-sets-new-skydive-record-25-miles-above-earth https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/25/358820835... not from orbit, but from very very very high up.
- oh_sigh 6y agoI'm really disappointed that JWST doesn't support visible light imaging. Maybe there's better science value to non-visible light sources but for PR it is great.
- dylan604 6y agoNot sure JSON Web Tokens can see any light really. The JWST on the other hand is meant to see further than what can be seen with visible light. We have bigger mirrors on the ground capturing visible light than what JWST could do. http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Comparison_optical_telescope_primary_mirrors.svg_.png http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Compar...
- jcims 6y agoThere's still a spectrum and they can use that for colorization - https://www.space.com/11985-spitzer-space-telescope-photos-infrared-universe.html https://www.space.com/11985-spitzer-space-telescope-photos-i...
- noisy_boy 6y ago> Researchers say the Great Red Spot now measures about 15 800 kilometres across, big enough to swallow the Earth. The super-storm is still shrinking, as noted in telescopic observations dating back to 1930, but its rate of shrinkage appears to have slowed. The reason for its dwindling size is a complete mystery. Isn't a storm's slowing down is normal due to loss of energy? Probably am missing some physics 101... Also, I didn't know there were auroras on Jupiter: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1613a/ https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1613a/
- Causality1 6y agoIt will be quite sad when Hubble retires. JWST is a superior scientific instrument but I believe something immaterial but very important will be lost when we don't have a high-power visual spectrum telescope overhead. Infrared just doesn't have the ability to fire hearts and minds like visible light.
- allenu 6y agoKind of neat how it's so far away that there's really no foreshortening of the surface since relatively speaking it's all proportionally the same distance from us. The surface just looks flat and not rounded like a sphere.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoReminds me of the Expanse, just caught up a few nights ago. They spend quite a bit of time on Ganymede and Io in the third season. Imagine looking out the window to see Jupiter taking a significant fraction of the sky. :D
- mocmoc 6y agoBeautiful
- bishalb 6y agoLooks like an oil painting.