Butterflies and Swans
Earlier today, the Washington Post reported that the National Reconnaissance Office will give two Hubble-class space telescopes to NASA. They were meant to be used for spying, but the NRO never got further than building the mirrors before they were scuttled to the redundancy pile, so they come with no instrumentation of any kind and are currently sitting in storage in Rochester, New York. Each one has 7.9-foot diameter mirrors, the same as Hubble, but they also have movable secondary-mirrors that give them 100 times the resolving power. Whether or not NASA will be able to get them in space remains to be seen, but meanwhile, the actual Hubble Space Telescope keeps chugging along. Above is an image released today taken near the constellation Cygnus (The Swan) of the planetary nebula NGC 7026, a "butterfly-shaped cloud of gas and dust [that] is the wreckage of a star similar to the Sun."
Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Advertisement
Comments