Comments on: Spitzer Space Telescope

Spitzer Space Telescope

homunculus — Sat, 20 Dec 2003 00:33:46 -0800

The first images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility and renamed after astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, Jr., were released on Thursday. Launched on August 25, it obtains images by detecting the infrared energy radiated by objects in space, and it will drift behind the Earth as the planet orbits the sun.

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Sat, 20 Dec 2003 00:46:55 -0800

Spitzer will be the final mission in NASA's Great Observatories Program - a family of four orbiting observatories, each observing the Universe in a different kind of light (visible, gamma rays, X-rays, and infrared). Other missions in this program include the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory(CXO). Go Spitzer! Spitzer's predecessor was the IRAS satellite which was responsible for many beautiful images including this one of our galaxy and the hell-like star-forming regions in Orion. So, even better stuff is to come...

By: mcsweetie

mcsweetie — Sat, 20 Dec 2003 07:23:13 -0800

wow the universe is pretty!

By: homunculus

homunculus — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:57:47 -0800

New Portraits of Spiral Galaxies from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).