Hubble Images.

Factual Questions
1

I got into an argument with a loon on another board the other day, and he happened to mention that only like 3% of Hubble images were released. I tried find some links to prove him wrong, but nowhere has any information on where to find a complete listing of its images.

Are all the images that are (publishable at least) released?

2

From MAST (Multimission Archive at Space Telescope) site for Hubble:
http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/

This is the raw data from which pictures may be constructed. If that’s not all the data, it’s at least a major chunk of it. Apparently anyone is free to acquire and make pictures out of this data. There doesn’t seem to be any requirement that such images always be released, but why would there be ?

3

From MAST (Multimission Archive at Space Telescope) site for Hubble:
http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/

This is the raw data from which pictures may be constructed. If that’s not all the data, it’s at least a major chunk of it. Apparently anyone is free to acquire and make pictures out of this data. There doesn’t seem to be any requirement that such images always be released, but why would there be ?

4

Hey! A question I can actually answer!

All Hubble data become publicly available after some period (usually a year unless special requests are made by the principal investigator). Of course, the vast majority of it is not of much interest to the general public, but if one really wants to (and has the computing resources to deal with it), one can freely get the data, which is automatically processed through a standard pipeline (which isn’t necessarily appropriate for all scientific work, so one can also get the raw data and do the reduction oneself). Sorry, but I can’t seem to find a cite for this at the moment.

Now, a few particularly nice, well-processed images do get released by the Space Telescope Science Institute (the folks responsible for operating Hubble) for publicity purposes, which might be what that guy meant, but I would guess that those constitute far less that 3% of the total data taken.

Ah! And here’s a cite.