Sunday, Feb 20, 2005
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By Tim Radford
The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered for the first time a population of embryonic stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy of our Milky Way. The smallest of these infant stars is only half the mass of the Sun. — AP
LONDON, FEB. 19. Pictures from the doomed Hubble space telescope made an impact because they looked like landscape paintings of the American west, an art historian told astronomers yesterday . The images were taken from raw data by sophisticated image processing and framed by choices of contrast, colour and selection. The product was a picture of the cosmos that balanced art and science. Elizabeth Kessler, of the University of Chicago, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington: "The aesthetic choices made result in a sense of majesty and wonder about nature and how spectacular it can be, just as the paintings of the American west did." The telescope, now doomed after 15 years because Nasa does not have enough money for a servicing mission, transmits black and white pictures. Untouched, the images would have been unintelligible to most people but astronomers took three filters, each recording a different wavelength of light, and combined them, adding colour to each filtered image. Ms. Kessler said the interpretation of the pictures suggested terrestrial parallels. Some looked like 19th century paintings of the American west by Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Moran.— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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