Opmmur
Time Travel Professor
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A while back, Hubble Space Telescope invited the public to have a look at its vast science archives.
Although scientists work with the data all the time, the public don't get to see many of the incredibly beautiful images that are stored in there.
Many people took the chance to go through the amazing archives and they found thousands of hidden treasures.
"Hubble has made over a million observations since launch, but only a small proportion are attractive images — and an even smaller number are ever actually seen by anyone outside the small groups of scientists that publish them. But the vast amount of data in the archive means that there are still many hundreds of beautiful images scattered among the valuable, but visually unattractive, scientific data that have never been enjoyed by the public.
The response was impressive, with almost 3000 submissions. More than a thousand of these images were fully processed: a difficult and time-consuming task. We’ve already started featuring the best of these in our Hubble Picture of the Week series, " ESA said.
Producing the stunning pictures that Hubble is famous for isn't straightforward.
Unlike your typical digital camera, which automatically sets things like contrast, exposures, colour balance and so on, Hubble is not optimised to produce aesthetically pleasing pictures. It's optimised for science.
Turning these scientific images into amazing images of the cosmos is not easy, as all of these variables have to be tweaked by hand.
That's called image processing - and it is a mixture of science and aesthetics.
Hubble is now shoing the most gorgeous pictures you entered into the Hidden Treasures image processing competition.
The pictures you are seeing here were all found and processed by members of the public.
And the winner is:
Orbiting the Earth for over two decades, Hubble keeps delivering some of the most beautiful images of our wonderful Universe.
Although scientists work with the data all the time, the public don't get to see many of the incredibly beautiful images that are stored in there.
Many people took the chance to go through the amazing archives and they found thousands of hidden treasures.
"Hubble has made over a million observations since launch, but only a small proportion are attractive images — and an even smaller number are ever actually seen by anyone outside the small groups of scientists that publish them. But the vast amount of data in the archive means that there are still many hundreds of beautiful images scattered among the valuable, but visually unattractive, scientific data that have never been enjoyed by the public.
The response was impressive, with almost 3000 submissions. More than a thousand of these images were fully processed: a difficult and time-consuming task. We’ve already started featuring the best of these in our Hubble Picture of the Week series, " ESA said.
Producing the stunning pictures that Hubble is famous for isn't straightforward.
Unlike your typical digital camera, which automatically sets things like contrast, exposures, colour balance and so on, Hubble is not optimised to produce aesthetically pleasing pictures. It's optimised for science.
Turning these scientific images into amazing images of the cosmos is not easy, as all of these variables have to be tweaked by hand.
That's called image processing - and it is a mixture of science and aesthetics.
Hubble is now shoing the most gorgeous pictures you entered into the Hidden Treasures image processing competition.
The pictures you are seeing here were all found and processed by members of the public.
And the winner is:
Orbiting the Earth for over two decades, Hubble keeps delivering some of the most beautiful images of our wonderful Universe.
