[ExI] hubble discovers jupiter brain

[Alfio Puglisi]

2010/6/23 Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com>

> 2010/6/22 Gregory Jones <spike66 at att.net>
>
>
>> Anders was right all along.  Is this a Jupiter Brain, or what?
>>
>>
>> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/22/a-vast-cosmic-cloudy-brain-looms-in-a-nearby-galaxy/
>>
>
> That's a pretty picture...but if you look closely you'll see that some of
> the brighter objects have a cross-shaped flares, as if Hubble (or NASA) is
> using a photographer's "star filter". Further inspection reveals that the
> angles on flares aren't all the same--on the left side they lean to the
> right and on the right side they lean to the left. It looks like the image
> was constructed by stitching at least two images together.
>


Probably many more than two, because the image seems much too big for the
Hubble field of view. Images like this are typically processed for
aesthetics. The different wavelengths of each filter are remapped to
different colours for maximum effect.

The crosses on the brighter objects are diffraction effects caused by the
four arms holding the secondary mirror in place. The holding arms
necessarily intersect the aperture. This happens in all telescopes, with
two, four or six-shaped "crosses" depending on the holding arms pattern.


>
> I wonder if the raw images are available anywhere.
>
>
Here they are:

http://archive.eso.org/archive/hst/search/

(or the older interface if the new one does not work:
http://archive.eso.org/wdb/wdb/hst/science/form )

input "LHA 120-N 11B"  (the catalogue reference for this object) as the
target name for the SIMBAD catalog. Beware that these kinds of data dumps
are quite difficult to use if you don't know what you are doing :-)

Alfio



> -Dave
>
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