Now I know this isn’t exactly within the purchasing power of the average photographer, but the Hubble space telescope has got to be every photographers dream? It can zoom into and capture, a practically infinite number of objects within the universe. Its important to note though, that even with this kit, you will never see and photograph everything, there is just too much out there.
The Hubble space telescope is an 11-ton 13m-long behemoth that was launched into near earth orbit at an altitude of 347miles in 1990. It brings new meaning to high maintenance kit. It had to be assembled, repaired and upgraded by astronauts in space through various shuttle missions.
Its unique position means it doesn’t have to see through Earth’s (relatively thick) atmosphere, or contend with our light-pollution. It has a state of the art wide field camera, and is the most technologically advanced instrument to take images from space in the visible spectrum.
Its aperture is a massive 2.4m! enabling it to capture light 10 billion times fainter than possible with the naked eye. The equivalent of detecting the light from a firefly at the distance of the moon! One of the most famous photographs that Hubble has ever captured, is known as the ‘Hubble Ultra-deep field.’
It had an exposure time of just over 11 days, and focused on a small region of space that was picked out for being particularly dark and uninteresting (pitch black to the naked eye and regular telescopes). Measuring just over 3 arc meters across, the area takes up about one 13 millionth of the night’s sky.
In Lehman’s terms, it’s about the size of a 5 pence piece… at a distance of 25 meters! This image saw as far into the universe as we have ever seen. Every blip, flick and splodge of light represents an entire galaxy, and there are an estimated total of 10,000 in the photo.
The dimmest and farthest galaxies here are over 13 billion light years away. Which means we can see the universe in the past as it was more than 13 billion years ago and came to an end in Hubble’s camera.
‘The pillars of creation’ is a very famous photo captured by Hubble. It shows three distinct trunks of interstellar gas that make up a small snapshot of the eagle nebula (a large gas color in the milky way). It is within clouds like these that stars are born. To give you an idea of scale, the length of the left pillar is about 7 light-years and four pixels of this image could comfortably envelope the sun and all the planets our solar system.
This Dramatic photo of the crab nebula is another photograph, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. This spindly mass of blue, green, orange and yellow is all that remains of one of the most powerful events witnessed in our galaxy. It is the footprint of a Gigantic Supernova spanning a gargantuan 11 light-years across and located over 6,000 light years away.
Despite the distance, the explosion was so massive and ferocious that people on earth were able to see it in broad daylight in the year 1054. It appeared in the sky about the size of a pea at arms length and lasted for 10 days.
This final Photograph is of a single galaxy (messier 104), also known as ‘The Sombrero Galaxy’. It is a spiral galaxy just like the Milky Way, but with a few differences. It is many times larger and as a result it contains billions more stars than our own. What is interesting though is how many there are in the central cluster (nucleus).
There are so many, so tightly packed, of such brightness that they illuminate the edges of the colossal disk of dust and gas that surrounds the nucleus. Astronauts voted it the most incredible image ever photographed from the Hubble camera, and you can see why. It’s rare that we can ever see a galaxy edge-on like this, enabling you to observe its 3D shape.
All of these incredible images could have been plucked from a dream, and are a true testament to the strange beauty and grand scale that can be seen everywhere in our universe. In my opinion Hubble has enabled the capture of the most humbling and breath-taking photographs that have ever existed.
Luckily we have all been fortunate enough to see these, however its expiry date is drawing near and is currently set at 2016. So for now, Hubble is the last of the optical space cameras. But what a camera it is.
SamAbout the Author:
Sam is an aspiring writer with an interest in all things digital. He has recently taken up photography as a hobby and has been learning the ins and outs of photography.