DSK wrote:
Bart Senior wrote:

What consellation or star means "keel"?
1 pt


Carina
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/con...ns/carina.html


It's interesting (to me, at least) that you used a reference to the
Chandra Telescope - that's the group that I used to work with. For
those that don't know about Chandra, its an orbiting telescope of
roughly the same size as Hubble, that images in the X-Ray spectrum.
Since high energy phenomena, such as black holes, usually produce
X-Rays, much interesting science comes from this facility.

The telescope I worked on was the first large orbiting telescope, the
Einstein X-Ray observatory. It was originally designed to the size of
Chandra, but then scaled back. After that project, much of the team
went to the Hubble project, many stayed and worked on high energy
telescopes which led to Chandra. As a programmer, not an
astro-physicist, I went out and started a consulting company. Hubble
was one of our larger clients until the Challenger disaster, which is
when I shifted to business software.

Here's a picture I took of Eta Carina with the Einstein Observatory,
Actually, the data is "owned" by the scientist who proposed the
observation, so he gets credit for taking a picture with a
$250,000,000 camera. However, I wrote most of the software that took
the data from the telemetry, re-organized it, processed and corrected
it, and put it on the screen for display. Each dot is one X-Ray
photon; the large diamond shaped dark lines are shadows from the
struts that hold the detector. This pic was photographed from the
screen (27 years ago the VGA-like system cost $40,000!) with a film
camera, and then probably scanned in from that years later, so the
image has had a tenuous journey from Eta Carina.

http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ob..._einstein.html