How does the Hubble Space Telescope take pictures? How long does it take it to take one photo?
1 Answer
May 31, 2016
The beautiful images that you find online are mainly from the Advanced Camera for Surveys or ACS.
This camera can take pictures with four different filters to capture the different colors at the wavelengths of 435, 606, 775 and 850 nm. The photos are the composition of many frames stacked together. Each frame takes around 1000 s to be acquired in each frequency and it is repeated many times. Between the various pictures Hubble is moving and orbiting around Earth, so it has to do many orbits to complete the image.
One of the most detailed image is the Ultra-Deep Field that required 11.3 days with 112 exposures for the 435 and 606 nm and 288 exposures for the 775 and 850 nm. For a total exposure time of around 1 million of seconds.
