Up until now, all my posts have been about Earthward-focused satellite imagery. A while ago, I took a class on remote sensing and since then I’ve felt more or less comfortable tracking down and processing satellite data for places that I’ve come across on platforms like Google Maps. The adventure has been traveling the world virtually. The result has been presenting processed imagery that tells a story about Earth.
Today, things changed a bit. I’m not sure how I got started down this track (the days are blending together a bit now in this virus-driven world) but I started watching videos about the new James Webb Space Telescope, which will expand on its sister mission, the Hubble Space Telescope. For a while, I’ve known that people and organizations aggressively compete for time to use this telescope, which I find intriguing (but also understandable given Hubble’s approaching de-orbit and death). But today, on some website somewhere, probably Wikipedia, I came across a statement that said normal people can also access Hubble data.
It turns out that processing optically corrected telescope data is not too different from Earth pointing satellites, it just takes much longer. The feeling of having access to the data from a 4.7 billion dollar instrument that has produced (with the ongoing help from thousands of scientists and engineers) some of the most groundbreaking and beautiful images of the universe gives me the shivers, and it almost feels like theft getting free access to nearly all of it.
For future posts, there’s now too much to talk about. Galaxies, star clusters, nebulae…
For now, here are two images of my first attempts of what was basically spending all day in Photoshop and Lightroom moving curves and sliders around to make something still scientifically true (more or less) and also aesthetic and artistic. There was a lot of fighting with the adjustment brush against cosmic rays (they pollute the data) and dealing with other visual quirks that probably have to do with the fact Hubble was built in the 80s. In the future, expect to learn a bit more about the universe alongside our bitty planet.
Galaxy 1: NGC 1097 from 2015, located in the Fornax constellation 45 million lightyears away.
Galaxy 2: ESO 510-G13 from 2001, located in the Hydra constellation.
Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and obtained from the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is a collaboration between the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI/NASA), the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF/ESA) and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC/NRC/CSA).