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you could win an iPod Touch in our Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Competition.

Download the data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, process using powerful open-source software such as the ESO/ESA/NASA FITS Liberator and make a beautiful image for our Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Contest Flickr group.

you’ll be in with a chance to win an iPad.

Both parts of the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures competition close on 31 May 2012

The best datasets that you identify will also be featured as future pictures of the week and photo releases on spacetelescope.org.

prepared some tutorials to get you started with searching the archive

Hubble’s Hidden Treasures 2012: Find and tweak Hubble observations using a set of simple online tools. It’s easy and fun, and anyone can take part. Top prize: Apple iPod Touch and goodies

Hubble’s Hidden Treasures 2012 Image Processing: Find Hubble observations and then process them using professional astronomical imaging software. An extra challenge for amateur astronomers or people keen to learn about astronomical image processing. Top prize: Apple iPad and goodies

you’re playing with real data from the world’s most famous astronomical observatory

advanced search option is useful to restrict the search to specific instruments (cameras) on Hubble

recommend narrowing your search to give only results from ACS, WFC3 and WFPC2 – Hubble’s general purpose cameras.

Universe is a big place

there are many, many objects which Hubble has never studied

not all of Hubble’s observations are images

most observations are only released to the public a year after they have been made

scientists get the first chance to work with their data. These are marked “proprietary data, no preview”.

several options for how to display the results

easiest is to click on the images tab, which gives you preview images of all the results

Another useful view is the footprints tab, which shows the location of Hubble’s images overlaid on an image of the part of the sky where they are located

in most cases) offer an option to open the interactive display

opens the interactive tool which you can use to look at the image in more detail, and carry out basic image processing such as adjusting the zoom and changing the contrast and colour balance

lets you save your work as a JPEG.

process is entirely browser-based, and you need no special software

You can also download the data in FITS format

can then use

FITS Liberator

Photoshop

more sophisticated image processing

designed to make scientifically useful observations rather than being optimised for pretty pictures.

most of these quirks have already been corrected in the data you find in the archive,

images are still scientific data rather than photographs like those from a normal digital camera

still contain far more information than the eye can see.

beautiful Hubble images that we all know have all been extensively tweaked and optimised by hand, in order to reveal as much of the data as possible

brightening the glowing gas in nebulae or compressing the dynamic range of galaxy images so that the core and spiral arms can both be seen equally clearly

Image processing is the name for this process of selecting data, adjusting colour, contrast and dynamic range to reveal the hidden detail in Hubble’s scientific data.

but they were never used

June 4, NASA announced its acquisition of the telescopes, and the agency's intention to use them for future astronomical research

The two telescopes have main mirrors that measure nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), making them comparable to the veteran Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into orbit 22 years ago. Grunsfeld called the donated optical hardware "very high quality."

currently being stored in Rochester, N.Y., in facilities belonging to the hardware's manufacturer,

cost to keep them in storage is about $70,000 a year

not insignificant, but it's not something that's unmanageable

One possible application for the telescopes is as a base for NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which is being designed to hunt for dark energy

Given budget projections for the next several years

in an extremely confined fiscal environment

NASA does not anticipate being able to dedicate any funding to the newly acquired telescopes until the James Webb Space Telescope successfully launches

In the meantime, NASA is investigating different uses for the telescopes, and hopes to have input from the scientific community to guide the decision-making process