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Well a meteor shower is a
basically a burst of lights, streaking through the night
sky. They're really pieces of asteroids or comets that are hitting
the Earth's atmosphere and getting very hot as they come through the atmosphere.
This week we're experiencing the Geminid meteor shower
which comes around every year in December. And you can see it
if you're in a place with a dark, clear night sky. And basically you look
up.
[slate] We have observed an amazing
cluster of stars with the Hubble Space Telescope
called M79, or Messier 79. This
cluster has over 150,000 stars kind of
gravitationally collected near each other. Beautiful colors
of reds and blues. These are pretty old stars.
Most of them are over 10 billion years old. The cluster
is. You can see this cluster with your own telescope
if you know where to look in the night sky. It's near the constellation Orion.
But the Hubble image gives you a lot more detail. You can compare it with.
So we encourage you to look at our new image. You can find it at NASA.gov/Hubble
[slate]
December is a lovely
time to look at the night sky. The air is cold and crisp and dry
and that's a wonderful time for astronomy. So in the night sky
you can see nebulae, these kind of fuzzy
gas clouds. You can see of course stars. You can also see
galaxies. And all of these phenomena include star clusters
have been observed by Hubble as well. You can see
many of these from a catalog that's known popularly by
astronomers as the Messier catalog. There are like 110 objects
in this catalog of stellar, or cosmic objects
that many amateur astronomers enjoy looking at with their telescopes. Hubble
has looked at many of these objects as well and we posted all those Hubble
images of the Messier objects on the Hubble website nasa.gov/hubble
So it's a fun challenge for
backyard astronomers to look for these objects with their own telescope
and then compare with the Hubble images of those same objects.
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I think anyone
can be an astronomer; you simply need to take time
at night to go out and look up. Especially on a clear night
take time to look at the stars. I enjoy just looking at the moon with
the naked eye and seeing the detail. Binoculars are the next step
You can see a lot of detail you would never have imagined on the moon just with binoculars.
You can also see Jupiter and its inner moons with binoculars
And of course you can see some of the other planets and stars
Then the next step would be to get small telescope before
working up to the more pricy ones. We also encourage people
to join a local astronomy club. Most cities and localities
have astronomy groups. It's fun to connect with them, learn about the
night sky before you invest in more expensive equipment.
And of course the nicest astronomy I think is to just find a dark sky. That's
getting more challenging these days. But find a dark place and just look up and enjoy
the grandeur of the night sky and the universe that we're a part of.
[slate]
You can learn more about
all of the Hubble Space Telescope observations
and even find out what Hubble is observing right now, but going to the Hubble
website, nasa.gov/hubble.
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The Hubble Space Telescope is in fabulous scientific
condition right now. It's more powerful scientifically than
ever. We've got several working science instruments, cameras and spectrographs.
This is due to the fact that astronauts have visited Hubble
several times over its 27 year operating history and
upgraded it. So it's in great shape and we expect Hubble will keep bringing
great science to us well into the 2020s.
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Well its hard to believe, but Hubble has actually delivered
more than 1.3 million observations.
Scientists are still scouring the archive of Hubble observations
and finding new discoveries and publishing new papers
We have over 15,000 scientific papers that have come out of the Hubble Space Telescope
and its observations. So this is truly an incredible
productive facility that's still bringing us tremendous science and
tremendously beautiful pictures of the cosmos.
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We have a really exciting plan ahead for using
the Hubble Space Telescope. One is that we are observing
the outer planets in our own solar system regularly to see how dynamic
the atmospheres are as they change. As we look at Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune
and Uranus. We're also looking at the atmospheres of planets
outside our solar system. We call these planets exoplanets.
We didn't even know there any exoplanets a few decades ago.
Now we know of thousands of them and Hubble is studying a lot of them to
study the compositions of their atmospheres. Farther
afield we're studying very distant galaxies to understand how galaxies
formed and changed over the history of our universe.
And we're even looking at some very mysterious phenomena such as very recent
gravitational waves were detected, these are distortions in space
and time with ground based observatories. And we used Hubble
to follow up to actually detect radiation coming from the source of these
gravitational waves. Turns out the radiation was coming from a pair of
merging neutron stars. So we're using the Hubble Space Telescope to
for all kinds of interesting observations both near and far
in our magnificent universe.
[slate]
There are many ways that you can engage with the Hubble Space Telescope
mission. One is to simply go to our fabulous website
nasa.gov/hubble. You can learn all about what we're observing
with Hubble and see images that Hubble has taken.
You can also join our campaign that's called #spot hubble
where you tell us where you've seen the Hubble space telescope in
cultural settings. Like on clothes and in art and
this kind of stuff. We'd love to hear about it. You can also find out about that on our website.
We're active on social media and you can also find out
about what Hubble is looking at right now if you go to nasa.gov/hubble
and Hubble itself will tell you what it's looking at any time you want.
to know.