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The Last Pretty Picture

By catdynamics on May 11, 2009.

The Wide Field/Planetary Camera-2 on the Hubble Space Telescope is being decommissioned, since the servicing mission is putting all the nice new toys on the telescope.

To commemorate the occasion, the Space Telescope Science Institute took one last "pretty picture"

Planetary Nebulae K 4-55



click to embiggen

Starts With A Bang is doing a Favourite WF/PC2 photos series, starting with the Hubble Deep Field.

I need to put up a "favourite WF/PC2 images" from papers I co-authored...
not as famous, but we got some pretty cool images over the years.

I hope it will be a long time before I have to commemorate the Advanced Camera for Surveys...

Cycle 16 Science Observations stopped at midnight (universal time).

Looks like Julianne got the very last data!

Looks like our program to observe globular clusters got its last data on May 8th, about 3/4 complete - bummernickels - I really wanted NGC 6441 data...

Tags
astro

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The cool thing is that we will see more nice WFPC2 pics for a long time, so many observations in the archive...

By Dunkleosteus (not verified) on 11 May 2009 #permalink

I can't help feeling that we're losing more than pretty pictures.

I grew up with the Mercury program when our teachers would bring in personal TVs so we could watch Shepard sitting too long on the pad (some of the kids had the same problem with that delay that he did!) Some of my similarly space-obsessed friends had one Hell of a private party on 20 July 1979, too.

The science we're getting from the space program now is amazing -- but it's harder every year to connect emotionally to it.

By D. C. Sessions (not verified) on 12 May 2009 #permalink