NASA recently celebrated the 32nd anniversary of Hubble observations. The space telescope was launched into space in 1990. It has completed more than 1.4 million observations since launch. A physicist named Casey Handmer has recently combined all these observations into one breathtaking image.
Handmer shared the image on Twitter in April. These images, which were originally shared in four parts, were later added to another tweet linking all of the Hubble observations.
We can say that this view is absolutely stunning and shows the enormous size of the sky. In fact, Handmer states that Hubble did not even manage to observe the sky as much as you might think.
And here's one that's a bit easier to see on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/dlNS5jbod3
— Casey Handmer, PhD (@CJHandmer) April 19, 2022
“Hubble’s field of view is 202 arcseconds,” Handmer said on Twitter. So it turns out that it would take about 3.2 million observations to completely cover the sky. More than 1.4 million Hubble observations had been completed by the time he combined the images.
However, although Hubble has made more than 1.4 million observations, it has often failed to observe half of the sky, as it has observed an area more than once. Curious how much Hubble actually saw, Handmer took the data from Astropy.org and began compiling it into an image. In total, he says Hubble has only seen 0.8 percent of the sky so far.
Explaining the biggest reasons for this, Handmer stated that some Hubble observations may take longer than others. In addition, repeated observations are made over some interesting areas. But perhaps the most important factor is that NASA did not design Hubble to map the entire sky. Hubble was designed to capture snapshots of specific places.
But even if its purpose was not to map the sky, we can safely say that the combination of Hubble’s 32 years of footage is certainly an impressive sight.
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