Don't bring down the Hubble yet, but . . .

. . . this is fantastic.

First you have to understand that when I was a kid the 200-inch Mount Palomar scope was the telescope of dreams - the key to the universe. Then it slowly became eclipsed by other scopes, plus light pollution moved in to surround it. Then over 15 years ago the Hubble Space Telescope blew every earthbound instrument away, since it didn't have to wrestle with the turbulence of our atmosphere - it was above all that! Well, despite a press release that sounds abit to the contrary, the Hubble is still the best - but for an incredibly small investment - one 50,000th of the cost of Hubble - scientists have now made the venerable 200-inch on Mount Palomar OUTPERFORM Hubble! Shades of the way my 8-inch LX-90 can blow away my 15-inch Obsession when I put the color hyper MallinCam on the much smaller scope - but in spades!

That's right, the 200-inch has now taken the sharpest pictures of stars in existence. And it's being done with a technology that isn't much different in principle than the simple video cameras amateurs are using and it's aptly dubbed "Lucky Cam." Here's a few examples of what it can do - then let's look at what it can't do and the Hubble still can do much better.

Here's the Cat's Eye nebula as the 200-inch normally sees it:

And here's the Cat's Eye when they use the Lucky Cam on the 200-inch:

And the other night at UMass Dartmouth when I had M13 up on the screen from my MallinCam someone laughed when I said there were a million stars in it. "How could they count them?" he asked, looking at the nearly solid globe of dynamic styar stuff. Good question, and there are already reasonable answers - but Lucky Cam may provide another answer. It can see stars in the core of M13 that are only a single light day apart. That's incredibly close, so perhaps direct counting is feasible. In any event - the first image shows how the 200-inch shows the core of M13 normally - and the second shows how it appears with Lucky Cam on the 200-inch.

So why do we need Hubble and telescopes like it in space?

1. Because visible light is only a small part of the radiation spectrum and much of the other radiation is blocked by our atmosphere. This radiation tells us a lot about everything that's out there and the only way to hear that story is with a space telescope.

2. The Lucky Cam covers a tiny portion of the sky in any single image. The Hubble takes a far larger picture.

3. Space is darker. Our sky shows a faint, background glow.

That said, Lucky Cam is incredible - and I'm delighted to see it giving new life to the venerable Hale 200-inch on Mount Palomar. The instruments we have today are truly awesome - if only our minds and spirits can keep up with the information they're delivering!

Want to know more?

See the S&T article here.

Or the Cal Tech press release here.

I didn't like the Cambridge University press release on the topic - though it was a CalTech/ Cambridge project, the Canbridge press release will leave a lot of people with the impression that the Hublble is no longer needed. Not so. Heck, we need all the information we can get - and , of course, it would be nice if some of those dunderheads who are wasting money and directing us to kill one another - while calling themselves leaders - would pay a bit more attention to the real world. FDR said the only thing we had to fear is fear itself - bull - rampant stupidity, ignorance, superstitition, cowardice, and fear mongering are pretty scary too! (Ooops - sorry - slipping into my political mode ;-)