and this sattelite that changed our perspective of the universe people want to leave it to plummet to earth to burn up in the atmosphere well we shouldnt do that i dont care if it takes 60 billion dollars or more we have to rescue it

Thanks that has to be the most awesome video I have ever seen, I love astronomy and understood the basics of how vast the universe is, but that really put things in perspective in such a beautiful way.It really made my day, thanks again for this great post.

I love this stuff.

I can't wait for the next generation of space telescope to be launched

What did they say? Roughly 100 billion galaxies out there?
Would be a danm shame and a waste of space if we were the only life out there.

We definitely need more spending for space-based ventures.
Perhaps some live-feed space telescopes!

That's the OBSERVABLE universe. What we can see from here. The actual existing Universe is estimated to be much much much bigger. What may blow your mind is how mich bigger it is today since the light which we see furthest away had to travel all the way to us. The Universe has kept right on expanding ever since that light 13 billion years away starting travelling to us.

There MUST be some other type of life form out there. I can't imagine all of that open space, and NOT ONE other living planet other than Earth. If we ever did find "others" just think of how their history, inventions, etc may have been. Just thinking about it makes me wonder more and more.

Very interesting. Thank you for the post.

darren14 said: "and this sattelite that changed our perspective of the universe people want to leave it to plummet to earth to burn up in the atmosphere well we shouldnt do that i dont care if it takes 60 billion dollars or more we have to rescue it"

and with that comment I think I'll use my favorite phrase.
"load your head, before you shoot your mouth"

seriously.
I was one of the people in favor of not refurbishing the Hubble, and let it die. But a large majority of people who didn't know anything spoke up, and Nasa launched another shuttle to the Hubble go give it things like a better camera and some new batteries.

even now with its upgrade its still not the best telescope out there. having your telescope in space doesn't make much sense, since it costs so much to get it up there...and once its there it costs a boat load more for any future upgrade to it.

When the Hubble was new...it made sense, but since that time adaptive optics have been invented...which essentially eliminates the atmosphere blur. which takes away the only advantage a space based system has over their earth bound cousins.

As for this video. Well Done. it looked superb.

Murc, he said "rescue" it, not "referbish" it. There's a difference. He meant that we should save it from destruction in honor of what it gave us, not upgrade it. It's a noble sentiment, regardless of however impractical it might be to bring it back to Earth safely.

Maybe you should do some of your own loading before shooting.

thx sec1has and i understand that its not the best elescope anymore i mean it is an old space telescope but we should find a way to save it without it we wouldnt have seen so much of the universe already and go look at some of the pictures generated from the data and saving it isnt that impractical i done some research on this and have found out some ways of saving it it only costs so much because of the safety standards NASA has implemented

I can appreciate the sentiment, darren, but when its mission is over, it'll be just one more piece of space junk making future missions more treacherous. Maybe they'll be able to retrieve a lens, or a collector, to be stored and forgotten in some space museum. Most likely, its journey will end in fire. But there are worse ways to go, don't you think?

Job 26:7 -- He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

At around 2:20 the narrator says "These galaxies (...) are racing away from us, in some cases faster than the speed of light". Could somebody clarify this?

For anyone who finds this fascinating, I encourage you to download the freeware astronomy program called Celestia. With the latest catalogue of over 2 million stars in real scale (downloaded from Celestiamotherload), within our Milky Way, a long with observable galaxies being represented (not explorable), all in 3D, this will truly blow your mind.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/

@Krystian: Imagione one of those galaxies is moving in a certain direction (we'll call it "north" for lack of a better reference) at a high fraction of light speed, say .75c. Now imagine that our own galaxy is travel "south-by-south-east" at a similar velocity... the net effect is that we are moving away from each other at more than the speed of light.

@darren14-

The Hubble really has approached its obsolescence. There is a Hubble replacement in the works with a proposed 2012 launch date. It doesn't make sense to leave the existing satellite up there, since we already have more than enough space junk orbiting the planet.

Furthermore, there are three terrestrial-based telescopes slated for completion in 2018 - each 3 to 4 times larger than the largest telescopes in the world today - and with far more light gathering ability that either the Hubble or its replacement.

It's called preservation for posterity, guys.

For instance, the Liberty Bell is no longer useable, and we now have reverse 911 to get emergency messages out that are much more efficient than ringing a dumb old bell. So why not just melt it down?

For that matter, why not tear down Liberty Hall, or the White House and replace them with more efficient and modern buildings. As for the pyramids at Giza, couldn't that rock be used somewhere else?

Many historical milestones have been preserved. The Hubble, or at least as much as possible, should definitely be placed in the Smithsonian. The Hubble will NOT be forgotten, because the images it collected will not be forgotten.

@SSG Snuffy.

If our Galaxy is moving at .75c away from another galaxy that is also moving away at .75c, making for a 1.5c departure rate... Wouldn't the light from the second galaxy be invisible to us? Light cannot travel faster than the speed of light. We should not be able to see it.

Just thought I'd toss that out there.

@ Giesterfarher

The light emitted from their galaxy is not moving away from us. If we are moving away from them at .75c, the light from their galaxy will still be approaching us at .25c.

Not really sure where you were going with that...

@SSG Snuffy.

If our Galaxy is moving at .75c away from another galaxy that is also moving away at .75c, making for a 1.5c departure rate... Wouldn't the light from the second galaxy be invisible to us? Light cannot travel faster than the speed of light. We should not be able to see it.

Well, yes, it would if your calculations were correct, but special relativity teaches us that one cannot simply add the velocities to get the relative velocity.

Here's a brief explanation from: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/velocity.html:

In non-relativistic mechanics the velocities are simply added and the answer is that A is moving with a velocity w = u+v relative to C. But in special relativity the velocities must be combined using the formula

u + v
w = ---------
1 + uv/c2

If u and v are both small compared to the speed of light c, then the answer is approximately the same as the non-relativistic theory. In the limit where u is equal to c (because C is a massless particle moving to the left at the speed of light), the sum gives c. This confirms that anything going at the speed of light does so in all reference frames.

Aww, the formatting was lost when I pasted the the formula. It should be:

u+v
W = ----------
1+uv/c^2

Grrrrrrrrrr. the formatting keeps getting messed up! Try this

w = (u+v) / ( 1+uv/c^2) where c = the speed of light.

The universe is simply too amazing. Too bad my life is too short to explore all of it's wonder. I hope NASA will do their best to give us more knowledge of the universe, so at least I can die happy knowing a miniscule fraction of it. Cheers NASA and all other astronomers out there.

"@darren14-The Hubble really has approached its obsolescence. There is a Hubble replacement in the works with a proposed 2012 launch date. "
What's the point? The Earth is going to end on 12-21-2012... didn't you see the movie?