Posts Tagged sun

Check out this solar transit by Space Shuttle Atlantis and Hubble! What’s that? Can’t see them?

Here they are! →

The NASA space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope are seen in silhouette, side by side in this solar transit image made at 12:17p.m. EDT, Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from Vero Beach, Florida. The two spaceships were at an altitude of 600 km and they zipped across the sun in only 0.8 seconds. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

Speaking of which, HubbleSite released this next image on the 10th, as the last picture taken by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2:

The Hubble community bids farewell to the soon-to-be decommissioned Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. In tribute to Hubble’s longest-running optical camera, a planetary nebula has been imaged as WFPC2′s final “pretty picture.”

This planetary nebula is known as Kohoutek 4-55 (or K 4-55). It is one of a series of planetary nebulae that were named after their discoverer, Czech astronomer Lubos Kohoutek. A planetary nebula contains the outer layers of a red giant star that were expelled into interstellar space when the star was in the late stages of its life. Ultraviolet radiation emitted from the remaining hot core of the star ionizes the ejected gas shells, causing them to glow.

You can follow the entire Hubble Servicing Mission 4, with videos and links to flight day galleries and other goodies. I always found Hubble to be… so charming, for a floating, inanimate telescope.

Finally, here’s a view from above:

S125-E-005175 (12 May 2009) — Among the first group of still images downlinked by the STS-125 crewmembers onboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis was this high oblique scene looking toward the Red Sea, Sinai Peninsula and the Mediterranean Sea. Saudi Arabia is in the foreground and Egypt’s Nile River and its delta can be seen (left) toward the horizon. Israel and Jordan can be seen near the top edge of the frame. The Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba (near frame center) extend from the Red Sea toward the Mediterranean Sea.