On the occasion of the last visit to the Hubble Telescope in 2009, astronauts had the Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 installed. It was designed as a workhorse. It has often lived up to this designation, which implies hard work, because of its uncomplicated reliability. Now she has delivered a picture of a galaxy in the constellation Fornax that a science fiction director could not have created more spectacularly.
Pictures from the oven
If you think of a Thinking of an ancient god or an animal is wrong, explains Nasa. The name Fornax is much more mundane, it is simply the Latin word for oven. The agency adds that the constellation got its name from Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer born in 1713. It wasn’t the only constellation he gave a name to.
Nasa explains: “Lacaille named 14 of the 88 constellations that we still know today. He seems to have had a preference for naming constellations after scientific instruments, including Atlia (the air pump), Norma (the ruler) and Telescopium (the telescope) ”.
Hubble consists essentially of eighties components
Space telescope Hubble. (Photo: NASA)
The photo was the latest in a long series of beautiful images captured by the cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope during its three decades of observation of the cosmos. In the early summer it looked like Hubble was lost forever. A central computer system had shut down. In this context, it paid off that NASA had given the telescope a backup system on its last visit. The NASA experts were able to activate this and revive Hubble in this way.
How long the veteran will continue to deliver pictures with his technology from the eighties of the last century can currently only be speculated. So let’s look forward to new Hubble pictures while we still get them.
