Hey, if you're in the Washington DC area until mid-December, make a special effort to go to the National Air and Space Museum. It's a rockin' cool place in its own right, but for the next couple of weeks it'll be extra-special: WFPC2 and COSTAR -- two of the instruments from the Hubble Space Telescope that were removed in the last servicing mission -- will be on display there!
An older camera, the Faint Object Spectrograph, has been at the NASM for a few years now, and now these two will join it. The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was put on board in 1994, and was the first camera to internally correct for Hubble's out-of-focus mirror. It revolutionized the way the public sees astronomy, having been used to create such iconic images as The Pillars of Creation, seen here. The Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement was a gizmo ...
