Can i see hubble

Sunshield Size Webb's sunshield is about 22 meters by 12 meters It's about half as big as a aircraft. The sunshield is about the size of a tennis court. Orbit The Earth is million km from the Sun and the moon orbits the earth at a distance of approximately , km. Because Hubble is in Earth orbit, it was able to be launched into space by the space shuttle.

Webb will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket and because it won't be in Earth orbit, it is not designed to be serviced by the space shuttle.

This will help Webb stay cool, which is very important for an infrared telescope. As the Earth orbits the Sun, Webb will orbit with it - but stay fixed in the same spot with relation to the Earth and the Sun, as shown in the diagram to the left.

Actually, satellites orbit around the L2 point, as you can see in the diagram - they don't stay completely motionless at a fixed spot. Because of the time it takes light to travel, the farther away an object is, the farther back in time we are looking. This illustration compares various telescopes and how far back they are able to see.

Essentially, Hubble can see the equivalent of "toddler galaxies" and Webb Telescope will be able to see "baby galaxies". One reason Webb will be able to see the first galaxies is because it is an infrared telescope.

The universe and thus the galaxies in it is expanding. In contrast, the ISS passes over much more of the Earth because its orbit has a higher inclination at This inclination was chosen because it works best for launches from Russia and it takes less fuel for the USA to launch to higher inclinations than it would for Russia to launch to lower inclinations.

In fact, not only is the Russian launch site at Baikonur further north than Cape Canaveral, but spacecraft launched from there are given an extra boost to ensure that if an accident were to happen no debris would fall into China, Russia's neighbour. The outcome for Hubble, is that its flight path stretches as far north as Cape Canaveral, Florida and approximately as far south as Brisbane which has a latitude of So northern parts of Australia have great access to seeing the HST and can catch the telescope flying right overhead.

Unfortunately for people in the south, like myself in Melbourne, the telescope travels much closer to the horizon, and it's even worse for Tasmania but not impossible. Both websites allow you to adjust the latitude and longitude for your specific location, including in-built search facilities that will locate most cities and towns.

The Heavens-Above site provides a great star chart showing the telescope's path across the sky for each event, while N2YO. There are some great passes coming up for Darwin, including Sunday May 3 , when the telescope will travel directly overhead from am to am local time.

A few days later it will be Brisbane's turn, with the best HST pass occurring on May 7 , between am and am. Because Hubble will travel right overhead it will also be at its brightest during these passes.

It will appear about as bright as the brightest star in the Southern Cross , known as Acrux which shines at a magnitude of 0. For other capital cities, which are further south, the HST doesn't climb as high in the sky and the best passes coming up will occur on the mornings of May 11 or May 12 click on the capital cities mentioned below to obtain details of each HST pass.

From Perth and Sydney , the telescope will appear about as bright as Gamma Crucis in the Southern Cross around magnitude 1.

Adelaide and Canberra will see the HST travel 32 degrees above the northern horizon. While in Melbourne , the telescope drops to an altitude of 20 degrees and for Hobart it almost hugs the horizon, just reaching a height of 10 degrees. It'll also be fainter, about as bright as Epsilon Crucis , the faint fifth star of the Southern Cross.

So dark skies and good views of the northern horizon will be important considerations. By my rough calculations, Hubble's odometer is approaching almost 6 billion km, that's like travelling to the sun and back 20 times.

The telescope truly is an engineering marvel, so why not give it a try and see the orbiting space observatory for yourself. Explore further. More from Astronomy and Astrophysics. Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. By: Alan MacRobert October 29, Explore the Night with Bob King.

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Like using a long exposure on a digital camera, these long exposure shots up to several weeks reveal very faint details that are not normally visible in shorter exposures.

Hubble's so-called angular resolution — or sharpness — is measured as the smallest angle on the sky that it can resolve i. Quite impressive! But Hubble would have to look down through the atmosphere, which would blur the images and make the actual resolution worse. In addition, Hubble orbits the Earth at such a rate that any image it took would be blurred by the motion. In the past Hubble was pointed towards Earth several times to calibrate some of its instruments.

JWST will not be a like-for-like replacement of Hubble. The biggest difference is that it will be optimised for observing infrared light with limited visible light capabilities , while Hubble is optimised for visible and UV light with limited infrared capabilities. This means it will be better at looking through dust and gas clouds, which is useful for studying star formation. It will also be much better for studying highly redshifted objects, and is therefore expected to make major contributions to the study of the very early Universe.

This is a bit difficult to explain in just a few sentences. Hubble has measured the age and size of the Universe better than before by refining the value for the Hubble constant, which is related to the expansion rate of the Universe. It has also seen details which are not visible from the ground in the first galaxies. Today we know that galaxies were formed earlier than previously thought and most scientists also believe that they evolve by colliding and merging together.

There have been a few cases where Hubble has been aimed at the Moon - see here. This has to be done with the greatest care since the Moon is very bright , and is normally avoided. To see the surface of the Moon in enough detail, you simply need to get nearer to the lunar surface than Hubble is Hubble is not significantly closer to the Moon than we are here on Earth.

The Apollo landing sites are visible in these observations. See the images here and here. Firstly we should say that a bright, high-contrast feature such as a star can be seen however small in angular terms it appears. In these cases the star would just appear as a dot. So, if there were a very shiny surface on the Moon that caught the Sun, it might be seen from Earth with quite a small telescope.

Here we will try to answer the related question of how close together two features can be and still be discerned as separate — this is called the angular resolution. The telescope diameter, D, is also in metres.

Note that the resolution gets better at shorter wavelengths, so we will use the second of these numbers from now on. However, the detectors have pixels that are quite large relative to these values in most cases and this degrades the resolution somewhat. So for Hubble, we conclude that the best resolution we are likely to manage is about 0.

Unfortunately it is very difficult for Hubble to observe the Moon — because the telescope is rapidly orbiting the Earth the Moon appears to swing backwards and forwards in the sky very rapidly and it is almost impossible for the telescope to compensate — so it is unlikely that this limit could ever be approached.

The similarity of the expansion of the Universe to a conventional blast is a typical misconception in the popularisations of the cosmological model, possibly due to the unfortunate choice of the name Big Bang. The expansion of the Universe is totally different from a conventional blast, which happens within a given space. The expansion of the Universe is the expansion of spacetime itself, together with its energy—matter content.

Admittedly it is not easy to imagine the correct scenario, because it is so different from our experience of everyday life. Therefore, if we look at objects which are at some distance from us, we see them as they were sometime ago, the elapsed time being exactly the time needed by the light to reach us. For example, the most recent image of the surface of the Sun that we can observe is always at least eight minutes old, because it takes about eight minutes for sunlight to reach the Earth.

If you look at the stars in the constellation of Orion, which are roughly at a distance of — light-years, you see them as they were — years ago.