August 17, 2009. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Caption for picture GN24920C

LONDON, August 17, Graphic News: Almost 400 years after Galileo turned his telescope to the stars -- heralding the birth of modern astronomy -- this image of the Crab Nebula was recorded by the Hubble Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).

Galileo’s observations were made using a telescope which had a magnification of 20 times and a field of view of about 15 minutes of arc. This meant that just a quarter of the full moon would completely fill the eyepiece.

By contrast, Hubble’s WFPC2 has a much smaller field of view (2.7 arc-minutes) and utilizes four postage stamp-sized Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs) -- which each contain 640,000 pixels. By concentrating all 2,560,000 pixels into a narrow field of view, WFPC2 can produce fine-detailed images of objects that are one billion times fainter than the naked eye can see.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s WFPC2, which operated aboard Hubble from 1993 until it was returned to Earth in 2009, made over 135,000 observations of the universe.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
/ENDS