Hubble Captures Comet ISON

Comet ISON is potentially the "comet of the century" because around the time the comet makes its closest approach to the Sun, on November 28, it may briefly become brighter than the full Moon. Right now the comet is far below naked-eye visibility, and so Hubble was used to snap the view of the approaching comet, which is presently hurtling toward the Sun at approximately 47,000 miles per hour. When the Hubble picture was taken on April 10, the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter's orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the Sun. Even at that great distance the Sun is warming the comet enough to trigger outgassing from its frozen gases locked up in the solid nucleus. Hubble photographed a jet blasting dust particles off the sunward-facing side of the comet's nucleus. Preliminary measurements from the Hubble images suggest that the nucleus of ISON is no larger than three or four miles across. The comet was discovered in September 2012 by the Russian-led International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) using a 16-inch telescope.

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Cycle 21 Announcement

STScI solicits proposals for HST Observing, Archival & Theoretical Research. Full details are made available through two documents, the Call for Proposals and the HST Primer.

The Cycle 21 Call for Proposals and the Cycle 21 HST Primer.

Cycle 21 Announcement Page Link

HST Frontier Fields

Using Director's Discretionary observing time, Hubble will undertake a revolutionary three-year deep field observing program to peer deeper into the Universe than ever before. The Frontier Fields will combine the power of HST with the natural gravitational telescopes of high-magnification clusters of galaxies. These will be the second deepest observations of blank fields and deepest observations of clusters and their lensed galaxies ever obtained. Opportunities to propose for Archival and Theory programs related to these observations were announced in the Cycle 21 Call for Proposals. There is also a separate proposal opportunity for the creation of lensing maps prior to Cycle 21.

More details, including a list of frequently asked questions.

Proposal opportunity for the creation of lensing maps.

Exposure Time Calculators

The ETCs are web-based applications that assist Hubble users in preparing Phase I and Phase II observing proposals. The ETCs calculate exposure times or SNRs for simulated astronomical observations using any of HST's primary instruments:

ACS | COS | STIS | WFC3