Hubble and the Messier objects

The Hubble Space Telescope and the Messier objects

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The famous Hubble Space Telescope is certainly one of the most innovative

tools of the astronomers in this decade; the present author is just now

going to predict (and is convinced it deserves) that it might win the

title “Photographer of the Decade” for the 1990, as Voyager 2 was

nominated for the 1980. Its most spectacular results, together with an

open and intelligent public relations policy of the Space Telescope

Science Institute, has provided astronomers with a great flood of data

and high-quality images, and an outstanding popularity, especially as all

the material gets public domain two years after it was obtained.

The Hubble results have revolutionized the state of knowledge in virtually

any branch of astronomy — not that every good result comes from the HST,

but as these data are available publicly, they are used if ever possible;

from planets, comets, and asteroids to stars, clusters, nebulae, and

galaxies, every sort of objects in the sky was investigated, often

obtaining most revolutionary results.

Among the most outstanding achievements are observations of objects from

Messier’s catalog, as those are outstanding representatives of all types

of Deep-Sky objects. Because not every author has made his results

available to the public domain, we cannot present a comprehensive review

here at the moment. But we have tried to link into our catalog some of

the most interesting achievements.

There’s but one fact on the Hubble Telescope’s optics which must be kept

in mind: The Hubble telescope has a very long focal length of 190 feet (58 m),

and thus a one degree field measures one full meter in the space telescope’s

focal plain, and one arc minute about 1.7 cm. As its detectors are very much

smaller, their fields of view are actually small, so that only photos of small

portions of extended objects like most of Messier’s catalog can be obtained.

Moreover, the Hubble Space Telescope is not only an astronomical instrument

(though the telescope makes up its biggest part) but also a sophisticated

spacecraft. As a spacecraft, it has proven to be very reliable, and was

so well operated that the technological operations did virtually never concern

the scientific program.

Indeed, Hubble is one of the more important in a considerably long list of

orbiting telescopes,

or astronomy satellites.

Here’s a list of links to the Hubble observations of Messier objects we

could collect with our pages:

We know of more good Hubble results concerning Messier objects.

They are listed below, and we would like to get images and more

information for inclusion here:

  • M81: The distance of M81 was determined

    from early HST observations of Cepheid variables. Are these reports, and

    possibly images/data, available online somewhere ?

  • M95 was a target within the

    key project of searching for Cepheid variables in neighboring galaxies.

    We are still looking for Hubble images of this galaxy though.

  • M101: The distance of M101 has been

    determined as 24 million light years, again with Cepheids.

    A HST image of M101 was in a recent issue of Astronomy magazine.

Also, there were older images which are not yet on SEDS, e.g. in the slide

sets of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, including more

photos of M42, M77, M87, and others.

If you have info on how these materials can be obtained to include them

here, please email me.


Links to materials of and from the Hubble Space Telescope:


Hartmut Frommert

([email protected])

Christine Kronberg

([email protected])

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Last Modification: 17 Feb 1998, 21:50 MET

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