Universe ID: 2796

Hubble Space Telescope: Image Deblurring with a Parallel Comptuer

Visualizations by Dave Pape Released on September 8, 2003

This is the star system is known as R-Aquarii, this system is comprised of a hot star orbiting a mass losing giant star.

An accretion disk is formed around the hot star as it captures the mass being lost by the giant. The accretion disk beams matter away from the system in the form of a symmetrical jet.

This is a raw image data from the Hubble Space Telescope faint object camera. We see that hot nebula matter that surrounds the entire system and the extended jet feature.

The raw data suffers from two problems. First, the flaw in the Hubble primary mirror; causes point sources of light to be spread out across many picture elements or pixels.

Secondly, the faint object camera has recorded the light in a highly non-linear fashion; known as Detector Saturation, the saturation manifests itself in the dark central pixels.

The saturated region is a valley of missing data. Restoring the data with a mathematical technique called maximum entropy.

Using the surrounding unsaturated but highly blurred data. The method is able to reconstruct the emission peaks that occupy the saturated region.

This region contains the main emission from the gas surrounding the hot star, the accretion disk and the cool star.

This is the most intense emission peak (shown on the left). To the right are smaller emission peaks coming from the more extended jet.

Visualization Credits

Dave Pape (NASA): Lead Animator
J. Michael Hollis (NASA/GSFC): Narrator
J. Michael Hollis (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
John E. Dorband (NASA/GSFC): Scientist

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

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https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/2796

Data Used:

HST/WFPC2

Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) was installed in Dec 1993 and used to obtain high resolution images of astronomical objects. This camera was removed in the last servicing mission so it is no longer in service.

http://www.stsci.edu/hst/wfpc2/wfpc2_diag.html

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HST/FOC

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This item is part of these series:
Narrated Movies
Astrophysics Visualizations

Keywords:
SVS >> Maximum Entropy
DLESE >> Space science
DLESE >> Technology
SVS >> Astrophysics
DLESE >> Narrated
SVS >> Voice Over Talent
NASA Science >> Universe