

The Most Important Image Captured by Hubble - pccampbell
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/important-image-captured-by-hubble

======
dandelany
Lately I've gotten interested in playing with some of the raw (or at least,
more raw than the standard press image) data from the Hubble and other space
telescopes... There is a massive archive of all the data Hubble has collected
at [http://archive.stsci.edu/hst](http://archive.stsci.edu/hst) and an
introduction to the FITS image format they use at
[http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/](http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/)

However, I haven't made any impressive images yet because I'm still trying to
wrap my head around the entire data pipeline & come up with a workflow that
helps automate the process. There is a ton of preprocessing that goes into
creating high-quality colored images from the raw data - you have to figure
out white balance, clean up hot pixels, noise and cosmic ray hits among other
things, align the images, decide which frequencies will represent which
colors, align them correcting for geometric distortion, and finally combine
them algorithmically.

There is an introduction to some of this work at
[http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/pipeline/pipeline.html](http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/pipeline/pipeline.html)
and
[http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/improc...](http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/improc/)
but I've had a hard time figuring out the best way to turn this process into a
workflow - I've basically been manipulating them manually so far. Has anyone
else experimented with this? I'm starting to consider putting together a
collection of scripts to automate some of the process, but it's a difficult
thing to do entirely automatically!

------
jere
I've watched this video several times and enjoyed it. But I'm skeptical about
the claim that it was "questioned" or that they really thought the image might
have come out completely black. Did any scientist think that between us and
the edge of the observable universe there was absolutely nothing?

Another minor nitpick: between this video and a similar one by the same
person, the image is said to have been captured in 1995, 1996, or 2003. Which
is it?
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG4IEePixoU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG4IEePixoU)

