Hubble 'scope snaps ENORMO SPACE ERECTION: Pillars of Creation 20 years on Nearly 20 years ago, the Hubble space telescope took one of its most iconic pictures – the Pillars of Creation. Now a new image has been taken, showing how the star nursery has changed in the last two decades. Eagle Nebula comparison What a difference a couple of decades makes (click to enlarge) The image, presented at …
Yeah, I know the imaging is fantastic, and I know the distances pictured are immense, but tbh I'm a bit meh about the miniscule changes shown. Surely only space-bothering boffins could get really excited by this?
And having two lovely colour images side-by-side but not having the decency to scale them identically (unless the whole thing has got closer/further away?) is a bit poor.
"And having two lovely colour images side-by-side but not having the decency to scale them identically (unless the whole thing has got closer/further away?) is a bit poor"
As a bit of an astro person I cannot see the difference either between the two, so yes, similar scale would help a lot
I hope they now point the telescope at it more frequently. We might learn more, and/or get prettier piccies. Or it'll turn out to be like one of those cartoon flickbooks. It's basically the universe repeatedly giving us the finger...
Or perhaps it's aliens with mind-bogglingly powerful ships doing likewise. Any species in the universe sufficiently advanced in stellar-manipulation to be able to create a V-sign nebula gets a visit from the ROU You Want Some Then, looking for a fight.
Fascinating. It appears to me that a lot of the apparent differences are due to the relative proper motion of our solar system w.r.t. the eagle nebula. This proper motion allows us to see the nebula in 3-D, as our viewpoint has moved enough in 20 years to give us human-viewable parallax.
If you resize the photographs on your monitor (windows photo viewer will do) so that both pictures represent the same solid angle and are the same size, and then position them side-by-side on your monitor, and then go cross-eyed so your left eye is pointing at the RH picture and your right eye at the LH picture, then the 3-d nature of the nebula jumps out at you.
That part at the top, that I call the 'head', the part that is the fox's ear is clearly sticking out toward us, and the part that sticks out at the base of the neck, just above the shoulder, is pointing away from us, its the other arm! There are other 3-D details too, take a look!
@MartinC: The Sun rotates with 250 km/s (0.000833c) at a distance of 32000 lj around the galactic center. That is ½ arcsec/century. In the timespan of 20 years galactic rotation can be measured by careful observations, but not as a stereo effect in a pair of HST photos of M16.
So what you see is the internal dynamics of the Pillars of Creation.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
