Idea to Image

I’m writing a proposal to study the Hubble Deep Field with the new infrared
camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Deep Field is a random place in the sky, up near the Big Dipper.
But if you look at any random place in the sky, you see many faint 
galaxies.  We’ve surveyed that before at optical wavelengths... now we want
to go back and take a picture with the new infrared camera, NICMOS, on 
board Hubble.

For the last few months, I’ve been pulling together the ideas to make a 
convincing case for this and we’re going to see if we can persuade people 
that this is the right thing to do.

So, this is it – the completed proposal – and now we send it by email to 
the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Mark’s proposal is one of the thousand we’ve received this year, that’s 
summarized in this stack.  And most of these are well worth doing on the 
telescope, but somehow, we have to choose about two hundred of them to 
actually do.

Mark’s proposal will be discussed by a small group of about eight scientists 
who are specialists in cosmology, his area of interest.

We got the time... but now’s where the real work begins, because we have to 
take the general plan that we outlined in the proposal and actually send the
details to Space Telescope Science Institute so that they can actually 
schedule the observations on the telescope.

We’re starting to schedule Mark’s observations.  Mark does have several 
constraints for his observations.  He wants a particular telescope 
orientation and while at that orientation we also have to be sure that 
Hubble has guide stars to track on and that the solar arrays are in full 
sunlight so that Hubble gets enough power.

We’ve met all of Mark’s constraints and it looks like Mark is going to get 
some great data and all of the scheduling is going fine.

And now it has to go to the people at the control center to actually upload 
the instructions for the minute-by-minute operation of the telescope so that 
the operations can be carried out.

We have just received the set of instructions from the Space Telescope 
Science Institute that contains the set of instructions to run Mark’s 
proposal.  And now we’re ready to load up the Hubble’s computer with these 
instructions.

Because the Hubble is moving so fast – about 17 thousand miles per hour – we 
don’t have enough time to really link up these instructions in one pass, so 
we have other satellites that we send these instructions to, which in turn 
relay those instructions to Hubble.

And then we ship that data to the Institute.

Well I just saw Mark this morning, he was very excited about his data, and I 
checked to see that it got here.  It arrived last night.

We’ve taken the data, processed it so that a scientist can interpret it, and 
then we’ve stored it on optical platters downstairs.

Mark will take these exposures and stack them up into the pretty pictures 
that you’ll see on the front page of The New York Times.

Well, this is it... this is the end product, the color composite picture 
that we’ve made from our infrared images of the Hubble Deep Field.  And I 
think it’s come out very nicely!