On July 14, NASA announced the public release of a huge collection of images (1.9 million) from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), the most thorough census of stars ever made. Using two automated, 51-inch telescopes, one in Arizona and the other in Chile, the three-year-old survey has so far taken images of half a million galaxies and 162 million stars. By its completion, the survey's catalogs...
Born in 1857 in Nashville, Edward Emerson Bernard started his long career as an apprentice to a photographer at the age of nine. Over the following decades, he would become one of America’s most famous observational amateurs, a position that would lead him to create his noted atlases of various regions of the Milky Way. The atlases were finally published in 1927, Barnard passed away in 1923, and...
The Annenberg Space for Photography is "a cultural destination dedicated to exhibiting both digital and print photograph in an intimate environment." Located in Los Angeles, the interior space is influenced by the mechanics of a camera and its lens, and it creates a compelling architectural metaphor for a convex lens. On the website, visitors can learn about the Space's print and digital exhibits,...
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been making images and data obtained by the Galileo Solid State Imaging (SSI) system available on an ongoing basis for some time (see, for instance, the Scout Report for September 12, 1997). However, for the first time, complete image data from the first nine orbits (G1-G9) have been merged, validated, and made...
Provided by NASA, this site catalogs over 1,000 high-quality photos related to space and space exploration. The collection may be browsed by subject or center or keyword-searched. The images are offered as thumbnails with three resolution options and text descriptions. There are some really neat images here, and the site is well worth a visit.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit has been a resident of the International Space Center for three missions totaling 370 days. During those missions, Pettit decided to take a number of photographs, which he recently published in the new book, Spaceborne. In December 2016, Chau Tu interviewed Pettit for the Science Friday podcast. Here readers will find Tu's interview with Pettit, alongside a sampling of...
This article from Space.com describes how scientists from NASA’s Deep Impact mission intend to fix the spacecraft’s blurry vision problem by applying a mathematical process to the images after they have been transmitted to Earth. The author briefly descibes the process, called deconvolution, and discusses some challenges that the researchers will need to address. Readers can also learn more about...