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Refrigerated Digital Camera Used to Take Amazing Space Pictures
Posted by Jesus Diaz at 8:30 AM on November 30, 2008
Greg Parker is a professor of electronics at Southampton University. He's also a wizard. Like his co-author Noel Carboni. Real wizards, capable of obtaining images rivaling the best of Hubble's using less than $US15,000 in equipment and more patience than any money in the world could buy. Their magic: A refrigerated CCD chip inside a special digital camera, a manually-operated dome, and some smart post processing in Photoshop.
Huge astronomy news! For the first time EVER, galaxy researchers have taken pictures of planets orbiting a sun-star, much like our own. The first, taken by the much beloved Hubble Telescope, shows a planet orbiting the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis. The second picture, snapped by upstaging Hawaiian observatories Gemini and Keck, shows two young planets orbiting a completely different star located 130 light-years from us! Take that Hubble! But I warn you—like the ultrasounds your friends show you of their three-month old fetus—these pictures wow mostly because of what they are, not because of what they look like.
A group of astronomers have taken the "Music of the Spheres" quite literally, and have recorded the sound of three stars that're similar to our Sun. The technique, dubbed stellar seismology, lets scientists get some idea about what's going on in the inner structure of the stars. This research was carried out using France's Corot space telescope, and the rhythmic beating in each "tune" shows that the stars are pulsing. But that clever and interesting science is not the eerie part. This is the eerie part: as you listen to the recordings, you'll be unavoidably reminded of the sound effects from the original series of Star Trek.
Before we completely bid adieu to our nation's birthday, we here at Gizmodo would like to give one more shout out to the fourth of July. Seems like even the stars in the sky can't resist putting up a display for good ol' American freedom. These red-white-and-blue pictures of Supernova remnant SN 1006 are what's left over from a star explosion first observed by humans in year 1006.
"Yesterday up in the air I snapped a sat that wasn't there"— so might photographer Trevor Paglen say about his show at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum. It's a series of photos of 189 secret satellites: the ones that officially "don't exist." Dubbed The Other Night Sky the photos are time-lapse images of the snoop-sats moving through the night sky, made with a custom star-tracker. Apparently it's his attempt to draw similarities between government secrecy and Galileo's historic tangles with the Catholic church. Found with the help of an amateur astronomer, each photo is of a named spy sat, and they're quietly beautiful—if you can forget the eerie spying aspect. The show runs until September 14. [
Taking a bath with me usually results in an out of this world experience of some kind or another, but for those of you who are too far away to experience such luxuries comes this bathtub planetarium sphere from Sega Toys. All you have to do is dim the lights and the HomeStar projects stars, underwater scenes, or even roses all over you, the walls, and whatever bath time companion followed you home that night. Hopefully it' E.T., and he feels right at home. And before you ask, the answer is yes, you could probably whip up a DIY model of this with a flashlight and a mirror, and save yourself 7,000 yen. There's no fun in that, though, and there's certainly no Japanese women in bath towels. Or E.T. [
I loved the glowing 
The Gadget: A plush star from Super Mario Brothers that plays the appropriate music when you touch it. Includes a goomba and a ? block.
The Super Mario invincibility doesn't really make a huge appearance in Super Mario Galaxy as far as we've seen, but this desk version should more than fill in. For US$17.99 you get an unlimited amount of star power activated in tiny little segments every time you hit the button on its back. Will it get old fast? Definitely. Is it worth US$17.99? That depends on how much you like shouting "It's a me!" to everyone who stops by at work. [
Eighteen years ago today, the Hubble Telescope was launched into space by the Space Shuttle Discovery. To celebrate its coming of age, NASA has released 59 high-definition breathtaking pictures of galaxies colliding across the universe. Above is ESO 99-4, a weird-shaped galaxy (probably the result of another collision) situated in the Triangulum Australe, around 400-million light years away from earth. [
