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[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Hubble Discovers Giant Rings and New Moons Encircling Uranus

Even though the Voyager 2 spacecraft paid a close-up visit to Uranus in 1986, the distant planet continues revealing surprises to the eye of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s high sensitivity and sharp view has uncovered a pair of giant rings girdling the planet. The largest is twice the diameter of the planet’s previously known ring system, first discovered in the late 1970s.

Hubble also spied two small satellites, named Mab and Cupid. One of the satellites shares an orbit with the outermost of the new rings. The satellite is probably the source of fresh dust that keeps replenishing the ring with new material knocked off the satellite from meteoroid impacts. Without such replenishment, the dust in the ring would slowly spiral in toward Uranus. Collectively, these new discoveries mean that Uranus has a youthful and dynamic system of rings and moons. Because of the extreme tilt of Uranus's axis, the ring system appears nearly perpendicular relative to rings around other gas giant planets like Saturn. Also, unlike Saturn, the rings are very dark and dim because they are mostly dust rather than ice.

More here: hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/33/

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The oldgirl is still pumping out images... ;D

A great telescope and quite moronic to have ever even thought of plunging it into Earth's atmosphere.

[Maddad]

I just grabbed a ton of web pages along with the highest resolution image from that site. Stated in 2005 (none were available from 2006 yet) and worked my way backwards to the Hubble's First Light image.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Dave,

Have you have assembled the images on your website? It would be nice to see the progression of images from the very start.

Remember when the Hubble suffered from myopia and needed glasses brought up by the Shuttle crew?

A good machine that Hubble...

[Maddad]

geocities.com/davidmadison02/index.htm Galaxies
geocities.com/davidmadison03/index.htm Nebula

I'm not doing them in order of when the images were taken, Joe. Actually, I don't have a good idea right now of what order they should be in. The pages are starting to get too long, even with thumbnails, so I will probably break them down into pages 1, 2, and three for both major sections on nebula and galaxies. Think I sort of stopped at 40 pictures for each page, but that's too much already, and I need to add some more to them anyway.

I may be moving my entire site away from GeoCities. They are a pain to deal with. Right now I'm only using 38 megs of web space, but that's way more than their 15 meg allowable maximum. It's why I have it separated into three sites. I'd like to put it back into one. GeoCities allows the 15 megs for free, but each increment after that costs a lot. The result is that a unified 50 meg site there would be prohibitively expensive, especially since I can get dial up service with 100 megs of space for $10 a month. My site's very portable, so once I get the account, I'll have the new site up the next day.

By the way, I got bother the Hubble First Light image, and another one that may be the first image taken after Hubble got its new spectacles. I'll have to check into it more to know if that's really the first one they took after the repair.