Or the other planets? Or am I wrong and we do?
If it is simply a matter of to much light frying the delecite optics, why can’t we just put some shades on the thing? And why not Oakley’s? They have the sort of chic quasi futuristic look that will fit well in a space based setting.
Because Pluto is too close. Ever try to take a close-up of something with a camera, but you can’t get the object in focus because it’s too close to the lens? Same thing. Hubble is just a bigass camera. Its lens is designed for looking at galaxies and stuff that are waaaaaaaay further out there than Pluto.
Well, we took pictures of Jupiter with the Hubble during the Showmaker-Levy collision. Those turned out very nice. And I’ve seen images of Pluto taken with the Hubble. It looked like a fuzzy blob. Even the Hubble isn’t good enough to take a decent image of Pluto.
Imagines can be found with a quick google search, or try the JPL website:
I don’t think that’s so Fredo. Wasn’t the Hubble used to watch comet impacts on Jupiter? It doesn’t have a macro setting but I’m sure it can focus closer than infinity 
Sorry, friedo, but planets and galaxies and such are all, optically speaking, at “infinity.”
Hubble pics of Pluto (and Charon) and Mars and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus and Uranus and Neptune
The reason you might not have heard of these is that Hubble’s primary mission was to refine the values of the (suprise!) Hubble constant, so planetary science is not a as high a priority as extragalactic astronomy.
Blech…that photo of Pluto sucks. Someone tell NASA to send up a better flashbulb on the next mission (hehe…now there’d be a trick…pop the flash off some 10-11 hours before actually snapping the photo).
[sub]I am just joking around here…no need to tell me to see if I can do better with my Nikon and a telephoto lens. I realize that’s the best that can be done even if the picture does suck.[/sub]
The Hubble has given us some great shots of Pluto. It’s the only telescope so far that has given us clearly-separated pictures of Pluto and Charon. Just because we can’t make out the President of Pluto’s beer warmer sitting on his back porch doesn’t mean the pictures it has given us aren’t phenomenal.
Mostly, the problem is that Pluto is way smaller than any other planet, and farther away. It’s just plain tough to see, which is why it was only discovered in 1930.
It looks like Pluto is just not very photogenic. But I would imagine that the types of photos being taken of Pluto by Hubble are much different that the pictures Hubble takes of those incredible looking nebuli, etc.
That might work, but your timing’s off. At its cloest, you’d need about ten MINUTES, not hours. Five there, five back.
Ten hours would take light spang out of the solar system.
Last time I checked, the Hubble (and other optics) were reliant on light to enter the lens and leave and image somewhere.
The Hubble can only work with the crappy light available from Pluto. Long exposures are only so effective.
Much of what the Hubble is all about is capturing events and objects associated with very bright light or distince signatures involving some light source.
Even in remarkable pictures of objects thousands of light years away, you are not seeing higher clarity than that of near-by Pluto. The problem is that relative to the horrendous crap any other optics could give you of far away places, the Hubble looks stunning.
So, you see what is a relativly stunning picture of something 1000 light years away, when the ultimate stunning potential might be 100,000 times greater and assume that Pluto should improve on the same relative scale.
Enourmous galaxies make for much purtier pics that the piece of orbitting crap we call Pluto.
I know about 40 people are going to beat me to this, but
Pluto is about 3.66 x 10**9 miles from the sun. At 186,282 mps, that’s about 20,000 seconds for a one-way trip.
Yup, 5 1/2 hours, more or less. So 10-11 for the round trip.
Heck, Earth is 8 light minutes from the sun.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by RickJay *
**
Sorry RickJay but you need to check your math or check a map of the solar system. The earth is very close to the sun compared to Pluto and it takes 8 minutes for light to reach the earth alone. According to a map on this Neptune is 4.2 light hours from the sun (unfortunately they didn’t map out to Pluto).
They do say on the same page however that Pluto is 5,913,500,000 km from the sun. The speed of light is 299,909 km/sec. So:
5,913,500,000 / 299,909 = 19718 sec.
19,718 / 60 = 329 minutes
329 / 60 = 5.5 hours
5.5 * 2 = 11 hours (the light needs to travel to Pluto AND back)
I’ve rounded a bit here and there and of course Pluto has an eccentric orbit so this is a rough number but still gives the idea.
The OP seems to be asking “why can’t we get more detail with the Hubble Telescope?” This is a good question because I have often wondered about the physical difference between a microscope & a telescope. After all, a telescope is supposed to make very distant objects appear closer, while a microscope makes very small things appear larger. But aren’t distance & apparent size inversely related? Yes but the devil is literally in the details. In both cases we are attempting to use magnification to discover the details of an object.
The answer (I suspect) is that Pluto just doesn’t give off enough light to begin with. What light it does give off is so scattered (in accordance with the inverse square law) by the time it gets here that there just isn’t any information for hubble to collect. For this same reason, we can’t point Hubble at Mars to peek into crevices & under boulders. Such fine detail just doesn’t make it all the way to Hubble in the first place.
Actually, magnification isn’t the chief virtue of an astronomical telescope. You can pretty easily make your optics to magnify something an arbitrary amount.
A telescope needs a large lens, for two reasons. One that you want to collect a lot of light, since most objects of interest are dim. The other important reason is that you need to have good resolution.
Resolution is the “sharpness” of the instrument. You can magnify the image all to heck, but if it isn’t very sharp, you have a big blurry image. The resolution of a telescope is defined as how far apart two features have to be before you can see them as two distinct objects.
Of course, how close two features appear depends on how far away the object is. So HST can resolve the surface of Mars beautifully, but if you move Mars out to Pluto’s orbit, the same features will look closer together, and be more difficult to resolve.
Hubble isn’t a very big telescope–just 1.2 m in diameter IIRC. It’s big advantage is that it’s in space, so the atmosphere doesn’t smear things out. Hubble’s successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope, will have a much larger lens.
When is the next space telescope due to be launched and operational?
The plan is to launch NGST sometime around 2009.
Padeye wrote:
To add to what Podkayne said, the Hubble doesn’t need to focus because everything that it looks at is effectively at infinity. It could even take pretty clear shots of the Earth’s surface - it could make out anything larger than one foot across, which is pretty good.
In the thread that discussed the Fox TV show claiming that the Apollo missions were faked, someone asked why the Hubble didn’t confirm the presence of the lunar lander’s descent stage. Fact is, if the Hubble looked at the Moon, the resolution would be a few hundred feet, so the lander would be hopelessly small.
and time is money…
The Hubble was built for looking beyond our solar system and it cost a GREAT deal of money. Especially after they had to make a set of contact lenses for it and deliver them via Space Shuttle.
To recoup the expense, time on the observatory is sold to various institutions around the world. And I bet it cost a chunk of change to get a slot. And only so many slots to go around. So why spend all that money/time to look at the intra-solar objects, that frankly aren’t that interesting, when you could be peering off into the farthest reaches of the cosmos, looking back in time billions of years? That’s where the really cool stuff is! I mean, c’mon! Peering out to the beginnings of the Universe, or looking at your back yard?
There is also a finite amount of propellant aboard and everytime you reposition the telescope, it costs you mass which again comes out to costing you money/time. There are gyroscopes aboard for minor repositioning, but any radical changes requires propellant. When the Shumacher-Levy comets smashed into Jupiter, they repositioned to 'scope to watch that because it was really the very first time we got to see celestial bodies colliding in such a manner. But it disrupted the viewing schedule for all the universites and frankly pissed off a lot of astronomers that woould rather be looking at nebulas. And if there is one thing you don’t want, it’s a bunch of pocket calculator carrying coffee addicts all mad at you.
So it’s all about time… and you know what time is…
I sit corrected.
You know, hasn’t it occured to anyone that maybe that’s exactly what Pluto looks like? Get real close and it’s still a smooth, slightly mottled greyish ball
We just think there’s more to it than we see