I was looking at some old star photos from the 90s and the detail is crazy

I was going through some astronomy forums and found a post from 1998. Someone was super proud of their image of the Orion Nebula, taken with a 14-inch scope and a CCD camera that cost over $10,000. The photo was only 512 by 512 pixels! Now, a beginner with a $500 camera and a small scope can get way more detail from their backyard. It really hit me how fast the tech has changed in just 25 years. Does anyone else have a favorite 'old' astro image that shows how far we've come?

4 comments

4 Comments

adam_lewis1mo ago

Read an article about the first Hubble Deep Field image. It was a huge deal when it came out, but by today's standards the data looks pretty noisy and rough. I mean, it completely changed everything we knew, but the tech to make it was a real struggle back then.

paigep201mo agoMost Upvoted

Wow, that's such a good point about how far we've come. It's wild to see those old images knowing they were the absolute best we could do. Makes you appreciate the struggle behind every big leap.

paigep2014d agoMost Upvoted

Has anyone ever tried using modern processing software to clean up that original Hubble data and see what it would look like today?

reesemoore14d ago

Exactly. The funny thing is, the engineers had to design a whole new way to point the telescope just to get that image. Hubble had that crippling mirror flaw that made everything blurry at first, so they had to do complex computer corrections before they could even point it at that tiny empty patch of sky for ten days straight. The detectors themselves were basically glorified black and white TV cameras compared to what's on JWST now. It's like comparing a flip phone to a modern smartphone, but that flip phone photo still changed astronomy overnight.