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NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which captured beautiful images of the sky for sixteen years, has produced a final image from the data collected before it was retired earlier this year. It shows the California Nebula, located 1,000 light years from Earth.
Spitzer took images at the infrared wavelength, which means he could see through dust clouds that would be opaque at the wavelengths of visible light. Since structures like nebulae have large amounts of warm dust in them, being able to see through this gave a whole new vision of what was going on inside.
This final image is a mosaic, showing images captured at different wavelengths. On the left, in the cyan section, infrared light was captured at a wavelength of 3.6 microns. On the right, in the red section, light was captured at the 4.5 micron wavelength. In between, in the gray section, both wavelengths combine to create an image that has more detail than could be achieved by imaging at any wavelength.
The images were captured on January 25 of this year, just a few days before the telescope was officially decommissioned on January 30. The scientists who managed the Spitzer project wanted to make the most of the last days of the telescope, so they chose this nebula for imaging because it had not been photographed before and has interesting features that could be seen in infrared.
Although the telescope will no longer capture more images, it does leave a treasure trove of publicly accessible data that astronomers will be able to analyze to continue making new discoveries.
“At some point in the future, some scientist will be able to use that data to make a really interesting analysis,” said Sean Carey, manager of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech, and one of the team members who chose this location for the image, he said in a sentence. “The entire Spitzer data file is available for use by the scientific community. This is another piece of heaven that we are putting there for everyone to study. “
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