Can you rent the hubble telescope

Photo credit: Elisa Webster. This includes for all tours and observing sessions, the Museum, the inch telescope viewing Gallery, the Saturday Evening Talks in the Auditorium, and the Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome. This world-heritage class instrument, used by many of the greatest astronomers of the Twentieth Century, has only recently been made available for regular public viewing.

It is the largest telescope in the world that you can rent! Imagine looking through the telescope used by astronomers Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason in the late s to measure the expansion of the Universe. Your Session Director will contact you a week before your reservation and arrange the details of your visit.

Important: Unless other arrangements have been made, your Session Director will meet guests arriving for observing sessions outside the main gate. If you arrive earlier and go to one of the observatory parking lots inside the gate, your Session Director will have no way to find you and escort you in to park near the telescope. For safety and other logistic considerations, planning multiple additional arrival times cannot be accommodated. Parking: We can accommodate up to 10 cars or up to a passenger bus to park at or near the telescope dome.

Any greater number of cars or larger size of passenger bus will require special logistics and must be discussed with the Session Director well in advance of the session. National Forest Adventure Pass: Parking passes are not needed for telescope observing sessions, as parking will be within the Observatory, as instructed by your Session Director.

Cancellation: Your session confirmation or cancellation the day of the session may be done only by the Session Director. Pre-session Tours of the Observatory : A private tour can be combined with an observing session for a nominal extra fee.

This is a great way to get grounded in the remarkable history of the Observatory and to see the both big telescopes and the solar tower telescope before starting your session. To set up a pre-session tour, please request one when making your telescope observing session reservation. Dome logistics and accommodations Dome lights: Will be turned down to dim red for observing. No Handicapped Access: The dome was opened in and is not ADA-compliant, offering no access for those who cannot climb stairs.

Visiting is not suggested for those with respiratory or heart problems due to the stairs and the ft elevation. Chairs: Mount Wilson Observatory provides chairs. Restroom: Located inside the dome, between the ground level and observing deck.

Photography: Non-flash photography through the eyepiece during the observing session will be permitted, with the approval of the Telescope Operator and Session Director. Special and advance approval from the Session Director is required for cameras or other devices to be mounted to the telescope.

Before the session starts, feel free to take photographs of the telescope and Observatory grounds. Clothing: Warm layers like sweater, coat, hat, etc. Flashlights: Not essential, but helpful: White flashlight when leaving the dome; red flashlight during the observing time. Refreshments: You may bring your own snacks and non-alcoholic beverages to be consumed in the galley area near the observing level.

In contrast with other space telescopes, the Hubble is open for public use if in accordance with their rules and regulations for usage.

Each year more than 1, proposals are reviewed, and approximately are selected. Anyone on the globe can fairly apply for the usage of this space telescope, and there is an extreme competition in securing a slot of using it. One main reason for the permission of its usage, if the observations needed cannot be accomplished by any ground telescopes.

There is always a yearly proposal for the usage of the Hubble telescope. Likewise, these proposals are subdivided into various categories such as black holes, the formation of stars, celestial objects in the solar system, and more.

Further, the observing time of a telescope is typically measured by counting the orbits needed for a vivid observation. Likewise, these proposals are also grouped according to similar categories such as active galaxies, stellar physics, and more. The final approval for which proposals are permitted is done by the director of STScl.

There are several websites where you can view the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Avid Hubble fans, aspiring astronomers and other learners can definitely make the most out of these sites. Majority of these sites grouped their collection of images into specific categories for easier browsing. These images can be grouped into exoplanets, galaxies, illustrations, nebulae, black hole, solar systems, star clusters, and stars. Furthermore, they also feature exciting videos about star observations and information about the Hubble.

To have a quick view for some of these websites, here are among some of the more popular sites visited for Hubble Images:. The Hubble space telescope has contributed to humanity with new discoveries and allowing further study of the universe and cosmos. It has been orbiting the Earth and returning beautiful images for twenty-nine years since it was launched in The Hubble is expected to last until the middle of at full functionality.

The extended anticipated life of the famous space telescope is highly attributed to the successful five service missions done by astronauts during and This is an exciting prospect for astronomers everywhere - but especially for those in Europe where Hubble has been such a rewarding endeavour, says Esa project scientist Dr Antonella Nota.

And it is a peer-reviewed process so we never needed to put a finger on the scales. European astronomers are creative; they're smart; they're doing leading-edge science," she told BBC News.

It's a bit of a cliche, but Hubble has truly been a "discovery machine". Before the telescope launched in , astronomers didn't know whether the Universe was 10 billion years old or 20 billion years old. Hubble's survey of pulsating stars narrowed the uncertainty, and we now know the age extremely well, at The observatory played a central role in revealing the accelerating expansion of the cosmos - a Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough - and it provided the definitive evidence for the existence of super-massive black holes at the centre of galaxies.

It's amazing to think that when Hubble launched, scientists had yet to detect the first exoplanet, the name given to a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun.

Today, Hubble is pioneering the study of these far-off worlds, examining their atmospheres to try to gauge their nature. And although the sparkling eight-metre-class ground-based telescopes can now match - and even exceed - Hubble's skill in certain fields of study, the space telescope remains peerless in going super-deep. Its so-called Deep Field observations in which it stared at a small patch of sky for days on end to identify the existence of very distant, extremely faint galaxies is one of the towering achievements in astronomy.

These studies have shown us what the Universe was like just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Only JWST, with its finely-tuned infrared detectors, will go deeper still.

Kathryn Sullivan was one of the astronauts onboard Space Shuttle Discovery when it released Hubble into its km-high orbit on 25 April, - a day she recounts in a recent book, Handprints On Hubble. But what I had not really appreciated until I started writing my book was the extent to which Hubble - because of its gorgeous images and their mind-bending implications - has really permeated popular culture," she told BBC News.