Common questions

What does the Wide Field Camera 3 do?

What does the Wide Field Camera 3 do?

Extrasolar planets—In addition to imaging, WFC3 contains a spectrograph that dissects starlight in visible and in infrared light. Using this capability, WFC3 has directly detected water vapor in some exoplanets’ atmospheres and found indirect evidence of clouds in other exoplanets’ atmospheres.

What does a wide field camera do?

…important of these instruments, the wide-field planetary camera, can take either wide-field or high-resolution images of the planets and of galactic and extragalactic objects. This camera is designed to achieve image resolutions 10 times greater than that of even the largest Earth-based telescope.

What camera is used on Hubble?

Wide Field Camera 3
Wide Field Camera 3 With its high resolution and wide field of view, WFC3 has become the telescope’s workhorse camera, responsible for many of Hubble’s spectacular pictures. It has imaged everything from nearby star formation to galaxies in the very distant universe.

How was the main camera on the Hubble replaced?

In May of 2009, astronauts removed WFPC2 from Hubble and replaced it with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which continues to operate today – 28 years after Hubble first switched on.

How many megapixels is the James Webb telescope?

Each of the detectors measures 4.7 x 6 cm, and the total size of the array is a remarkable one meter long by 50 cm wide. Each of e2v’s back-illuminated CCDs provides a 4500 by 1966 array of pixels, meaning that the entire assembly represents a 937 megapixel camera.

Can the Hubble telescope see infrared?

The Hubble Space Telescope can detect a portion of infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths as well as visible light. It includes very distant galaxies, which can only be seen in infrared light, and closer galaxies, which can be seen in wavelengths that include visible and ultraviolet light.

What is Planetary Camera?

The Wide Field/Planetary Camera (WFPC) (pronounced as wiffpick (Operators of the WFPC1 were known as “whiff-pickers”)) was a camera installed on the Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990 and operated until December 1993.

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