Comments on: Hubble telescope has taken beautiful astronomical pictures. Is it digital photography technic?

By: wilde_space

wilde_space — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:15:56 +0000

Yes, it’s digital camera technology, but more advanced. Obviously the digital sensors in the Hubble and other space cameras are much larger and higher-quality than our compact cameras. Also, cameras in space take black&white pictures in various parts of electromagnetic spectrum, so to make colour pictures they have to assign particular colours using computers.

Here’s a page telling how the Hubble takes pictures: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/index.php

By: Urwumpe

Urwumpe — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:11:20 +0000

Yes, the basic technology is the same as you use for digital cameras, a CCD. The only difference is how the light gets turned into images – instead of a single true-color image, the Hubble camera produces two gray scale images at a time, each image can be produced using a different filter for selecting the wavelengths/”colors” that are visible. A computer on the ground combines images taken with different filters and created the images you see in the web.

Also, the WFC3 is actually two cameras in one:

http://www.stsci.edu/hst/wfc3/design/images/opt_path.jpg

One is for visible light and ultraviolet, the other for the many infrared wavelengths that are observed.

The UVIS camera for ultraviolet and visible light has 63 filters, the IR camera has 17 filters.

So, Hubble could produce 80 different images of the same object, each image showing a different wavelength of light.

Your digital camera doesn’t do that, it just takes a single image and has the filters already printed on the CCD sensor. Thus you only have three types of filters, where Hubble has 80.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:30:40 +0000

Yes they use similar CCD chips to those in a pocket camera but much bigger