Remember a few months back, when we were all excited about the Space Shuttle taking a crew of astronauts to fix and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)? At the time, it looked like the repairs worked well (as in, nothing obvious went wrong, electronics woke up and said "hi", etc). However, until the instruments actually take data, one never knows. Well, now we know.
The new and refurbished instruments officially kick astronomical butt. Even better, I've been hearing rumors of killer numbers, at least for the imaging cameras -- throughputs that are 15% better than measured from the ground, electronic read noises that are lower than before the instruments broke a few years back. I have no numbers on the spectrographs, but the press release photos show some nice looking spectra, which is a zillion percent improvement on the pre-repair state of the telescope, for which the only spectroscopic ...
