During their rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Astronaut Repair and Wrecking Crew will be decommissioning HST's longest serving instrument -- the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, known as "wiff-pick-too". NASA has been, correctly, describing WFPC2 as "The Camera the Saved Hubble" (see this video for a nice history). They've also been touting the last "pretty picture" taken by WFPC2 -- a rather nifty planetary nebula However, while K4-55 may be the last officially pretty picture, I'm absurdly stoked that the very last picture will be one taken by a program that my team and I are running. I knew there was a good chance, based upon a schedule we got a week and a half ago, but I wasn't sure exactly when they'd safe the telescope.
But, sure enough, we snagged the "last ever" spot (as Steinn deduced before I was planning on outing myself)! The last WFPC2 exposure ended at 21:03:12 on May 11th, the evening after the launch. It was of IC5152 -- a dwarf galaxy in the local universe. I'm not quite sure why I'm so excited by this, but I suppose it's that this is a camera I essentially grew up with (scientifically speaking). I was in grad school when HST launched, and when the tragic flaw in the mirror was found. WFPC2 was installed before I graduated, so I got to see HST restored to glory before I set forth as a scientist. It's nice to be sending it off in style. I'll add a pretty picture of the real last WFPC2 image as soon as we make one! UPDATE: Just to clarify, IC5152 was the last General Observer image. There was one more "snapshot" photo taken of a galaxy cluster by Eberling and friends. Both should be purty!
