Entries tagged “zolt levay”

Wait, remember when I said that Zolt Levay has the coolest job in the world, making images from Hubble data? Scratch that, now Mike Massee at XCOR Aerospace has the coolest job in the world: Taking awesome photos of methane rocket engines!

Best of all, you can even get silver halide prints of the sci-fi looking test firing. That's courtesy of Mojave Air & Space Collectibles, an interesting little company that's popped up to fill the niche of people looking for memorabilia from the many new private space programs that are starting to take off.

Well, technically, Zoltan Levay has the coolest job out of this world. Mr. Levay is the Imaging Resource Lead at the Space Telescope Science Institute's Office of Public Outreach. What does that mean? He makes the images that the media uses to show off the Hubble Space Telescope's discoveries.

He helps create HubbleSite, a fantastic resource for fans of the telescope and its discoveries. And on his own site he describes a little bit about his process. If you really want to get a feel for what it takes to create this kind of imagery, take a look at Making HST Pictures: Examples and Illustrations. There's a virtually infinite amount of interesting things to learn about the process, and most of the tools for working with this kind of data are free, except for Photoshop.

But more importantly, Zolt Levay gets to spend his time at work making things like this image of the Helix Nebula: