Good morning, Starshine! The Earth says hello
As telescopes get smarter and space voyages turn more adventurous, take a look at the best recent views of the worlds beyond our own, and what it takes to create them
As telescopes get smarter and space voyages turn more adventurous, take a look at the best recent views of the worlds beyond our own, and what it takes to create them
TAKING A PHOTO IN SPACE ISN’T A POINT-AND-SHOOT AFFAIR. EVEN FROM THE ISS, THE SUN’S TOO BRIGHT, SHADOWS TOO STARK, EVERYTHING GOES BY TOO QUICKLY
It’s a big year for astrophysicists. In October, NASA will launch the world’s most powerful observatory into space. The James Webb Space Telescope will be installed just beyond the Moon’s orbit. Its infrared sensors will peer through interstellar gas and dust, to see deeper than ever into space.
The farther into space one looks, the further back in time one sees, viewing objects not as they are, but as they were when the light that you’re seeing first left them. Even the stars you see at night might have long since died.
NASA says the new telescope can look far enough to see what stars, galaxies and solar systems looked like in the first billion years after the Big Bang (which occurred over 13 billion years ago). Crucially, its on-board camera will beam images back in high resolution. Pics, or it didn’t happen, right?
If you’ve been paying attention to the heavens, or at least astronomy news, you’ll have noticed how much clearer our views of space have become in the last few years. Until the 1990s, images of the cosmos looked like the inside of a discotheque — random pinpoints of bright light, bright blurry patches, mists of pinks, blues and purples.
Since then, space agencies and observatories have zoomed in on multicolour nebulas, starbursts, Pluto’s adorable heart, black holes, the Sun in close-up and moons on Mars.
Varun Bhalerao, assistant professor with the department of physics at IIT-Bombay and a scientist who worked on India’s first robotic telescope in 2018, says visuals are integral to the field. “Astronomy, because of its nature and scale, has no control over its experiments – we can’t fast-forward to see how the Sun might evolve. So observation is everything.”
No one’s looking through telescopes to make those observations anymore. Complex telescope networks do the peering, measuring and data-collecting. And as they’ve improved, so has the view. “The visualised data bridges the gap between academic knowledge and what one would see in space. It’s not unlike discovering the Mona Lisa, and seeing a whole new world,” Bhalerao says.
Those pictures have a history of changing life on Earth. Copernicus’s sketches indicating that it was the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the universe, shook the foundations of 16thcentury Europe and brought about a scientific revolution. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, didn’t pack a camera in his Vostok capsule in 1961. But the Apollo 8 crew, headed to the Moon in 1968, did. Their photo, Earthrise, depicting Earth peeking over the desolate lunar surface, showed us for the first time just how fragile this planet is, reminded us that it is all we have, and helped popularise the environmental movement.
SPECKS AND SPECIFICATIONS
Taking a photo in space isn’t quite a point-and-shoot affair. Even on the International Space Station, orbiting only 408 km above Earth’s surface, the Sun’s too bright, shadows too stark, and everything goes by too fast — there’s a sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes. But visiting astronauts now get mandatory training on how to operate the dozens of on-board, always-on cameras to take the best shots of a changing Earth. As a result, they’ve captured erupting volcanoes, Australia’s wildfires, snow melting off the Himalayas and coastlines as they’ve changed over time.
For objects far, far away, such as the nearest black hole — a dark something in a sea of dark nothing — it’s a waiting game. Eight telescopes across Earth collaborated to create the 2019 image of the supermassive black hole and its shadow (the dark centre, the point of no return) in the centre of the galaxy, M87. And even after the pictures were taken, it took two years to collect and process the data.
Because everything is moving in space — rotating, revolving, exploding, expanding or collapsing — even familiar objects take time to capture. To shoot the icy, gritty rings on Saturn, our solar system’s most photogenic inhabitant, the spacecraft Cassini spent at least a decade examining them more closely. It needed to find an angle that looked straight through the rings, and take enough shots to piece together the composite of translucent arcs that we finally saw in 2018.
For scientists like Bhalerao, the images are a way to see the universe beyond the numbers and calibrations that typically fill an astronomer’s day. “For us, usually, seeing the data is enough to fill us with wonder — like a composer who only needs only the sheet music to hear an aria in their mind,” he says. “But it’s quite something to see how vast the Andromeda galaxy is, or how brightly young stars shine in the Pillars of Creation nebula. It’s a breath-taking side-effect. It makes you wonder who we are in relation to the cosmos.”
Scroll through the universe with some of the most iconic space images in recent times.