Two Telescopes, Two Techniques
Flash interactive
Produced by the American Museum of Natural History, January 2006.
Interactive begins here
Page 1
Visual: A Hubble Space Telescope image of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is gradually revealed through a series of circular cutouts on a black screen.
High-resolution cameras like that on the Hubble Space Telescope image sharp details in space.
Page 2
Visual: The Whirlpool Galaxy image is replaced with a Sloan telescope image of the same galaxy. It is less crisp than the Hubble space Telescope version but more surrounding sky is revealed.
Wide-field cameras like that on the Sloan telescope image vast areas of space, but in less detail.
Pages 4-7
Visual: Four different scenes are represented: a crowd, a landscape, a running race, and a circus. Users can click to find details with a circular cutout view like the Hubble Space Telescope. Click-ing to ìscanî the scene in low resolution like the Sloan telescope gives them a sense of where to find interesting details in the picture.
Page 8-Hubble Info
Visual: Hubble Space Telescope image of red supergiant star V838 Moncerotis.
Hubble Space Telescope has a higher resolution, but a narrower field. Orbiting 200 kilometers above Earthís murky atmosphere helps Hubble see sharply. Hubble has revealed incredible de-tails about selected planets, stars, galaxies, and other space objects.
Page 9-Sloan Info
Visual: Sloan telescope image of a starfield with a dominant luminous shape, globular cluster M15.
Sloan Telescope has a lower resolution, but a wider field. The Sloan telescope is taking the first-ever survey of all the objects visible in one-quarter of the night sky. Its maps help astronomers understand how galaxies are arranged across the Universe. Its cosmic sweep has also uncovered rare space objects such as very distant quasars.
Interactive ends here