canspice.org

JCMT made it into the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

There is more to space than meets the eye, a Mauna Kea telescope demonstrated yesterday with the release of a striking image of a normally invisible gas cloud in the Orion Nebula.

The image marks a new era in space observation for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which until recently needed enormous work to turn radiolike “submillimeter” data into crude pictures.

Now, with two new instruments attached, the Maxwell telescope can produce not only “cameralike” images, but even three-dimensional movies of gas clouds across huge areas of space.

Not bad for an installation that, with its 49-foot dish, looks more like a radar site than a telescope.

Alas, the news story doesn’t have a link to the movie in question, but there’s a really good image of Orion.

A few nit-picks and clarifications:

• The term “Maxwell telescope” grates on the ears. It should be “JCMT” instead.
• These are not “the first clear images of such a large area of space looking at radiation shorter than radio waves”, as numerous other sub-millimeter images have been produced. Take, for example, the centre of the Milky Way. I don’t know if the Orion map is actually bigger than the Galactic Centre map though…
• This sequence of events:
  

  The Maxwell astronomers focused on the frequency given off by carbon monoxide, the same gas found in cigarette smoke and car exhaust.

  Next, the astronomers made more pictures, each in a slightly different wavelength of submillimeter radiation, depending on whether the CO molecules were moving toward or away from the telescope.

  They called each of these pictures a “slice.” Finally the slices were linked together to make an animated “movie” of a flight through the nebula.

  …is misleading, as the instrument in question (HARP-B with the ACSIS backend) actually observes 8192 different frequencies simultaneously at 16 positions in space. What actually happened is that the telescope scanned across Orion, collecting data at 8192 frequencies the whole time, and then the resulting data (called a time-series cube) was turned into a spatial/spectral cube. The “slices” are as they described, sampling a discrete frequency for a given region of space.

I have a bonus animation movie of a different star-formation region, but I don’t know if I’m actually allowed to show it to the public…