I am a lot of things, one of which is a nerd for anything involving space. I would have been a physicist if I could actually get a decent grasp of math without my brain melting. I curse the artist that I was born to be that for some reason had problems with Algebra and Calculus. That doesn’t stop me from reading as many books, watching as many documentaries and just absorbing as much about space and physics that I can, I just stay away from anything that delves too far into the math stuff.
The Hubble Telescope was kind of the laughing stock of the space program back in the 90’s due to how many problems it had, but when it does stuff right it really is something to behold. There was a problem with the mirror initially, causing the images to be out of focus, which was still pretty sharp, but not what they expected for such an expensive and advanced instrument, so they devised a rather ingenious solution of putting a corrective lense over the defective mirror, as opposed to swapping it out. Essentially, they put some glasses over it and it fixed it.
Since then the Hubble has captured some truly fascinating images and been an invaluable tool in exploring space. This latest image that was capture is of the comet ISON, which at the time of these images was 403 million miles from Earth. The photos of the comet were captured over the span of 43 minutes and condensed into a five second video where the comet travels 34,000 miles.
That is really kind of awesome, right?
