The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched into space yesterday (August 30, 2026) at 11:26 UTC aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket! It’s headed for the Earth-Sun L2 point, a gravitational stable region of space about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where it can remain without much need for station-keeping. It’ll get there in a month or so, then go through an extended checkout phase before routine operations start. 

I wrote about Roman’s capabilities here on BAN in Issue #968, and just wrote an article for my column in Scientific American about its coronagraphic instrument that will get direct observations of exoplanets. Roman is much like Hubble, except it has a far wider field of view, and can see an area on the sky 100 times larger than Hubble! What takes Hubble many hours Roman can do in one shot, though at about half the resolution (so it can’t see details quite as well, but still way better than most other telescopes). Its main camera, the Wide-Field Instrument (WFI), has a wider wavelength range, too, capable of detecting light from blue out to near infrared at about 2.3 microns (roughly three times longer than the reddest color your eye can see). This overlaps with JWST, too, so that’s cool. That helps tie observations together from different missions.

I hope for very big things from this machine, including incredibly dramatic images of the sky that will be impossible to display at full resolution due to their immense size (the WFI is a 300 megapixel camera, after all!). But even the sub-images will be amazing, and the science — looking to characterize dark energy, among many many other goals — will be fantastic.

But that’s months away now. Calibrating and testing the cameras will take a while — I’ve been through this with Hubble, and I know the folks on the Roman team will be very busy for the next few months. Congrats to all of them for a successful launch, and lets hope the rest of the mission goes as well. 

For updates, NASA has a blog set up with current news.

Speaking of space telescopes…

Every now and again, you just need a dynamite image of a stunning spiral galaxy from Hubble Space Telescope.

I am here to serve:

Woof. That’s NGC 3137, a spiral galaxy about 50 million light-years from us. If we saw it face-on it would likely look circular, with its broad disk of wide-flung arms. However, by happenstance we see it from a much lower angle, closer to edge-on. This foreshortens the disk, making it look more like an oval, and makes the arms a bit harder to see. 

I found this interesting: it’s one of two large spiral members of a small group of galaxies (the other spiral being NGC 3175). The group has a lot of smaller satellite galaxies too… and if this sounds familiar, it’s because our own Local Group of galaxies is similar, with the Milky Way and Andromeda being the lead members, and a bunch of smaller galaxies tagging along. Nomenclaturally speaking (a word I just made up), there isn’t really a dividing line between a group and a cluster of galaxies; they’re just somewhat informally designated; a group is a few bigger galaxies with perhaps lots of smaller ones, but a cluster is larger, with dozens or hundreds (or thousands!) or big galaxies.

Anyway, I was really drawn in by this image. NGC 3137 has a lot of star-forming nebulae, hydrogen gas clouds seen as reddish blobs strewn along the spiral arms. There are also a lot of clumps of blue stars — these are young, massive stars that can be many thousands of times more luminous than the sun, so they shine brightly and are easy to see even though they are relatively rare. They don’t live long, so they tend to be near the nebulae in which they were born.

Note that the center of the galaxy, called the bulge, is yellowish; star formation ceased there long ago, and all the blue stars have long since exploded as supernovae. All that’s left are stars that are yellower, oranger, and redder.

These colors are interesting, and are so vivid I was suspicious about how the image was made. Sure enough, instead of just using three color filters to mimic natural light (like how our eyes see), this image uses six! What does that mean?

Each filter lets through a specific range of colors of light. Then, after some processing of the individual images to clean them up, a visual artist combines them. Each filter is assigned a color to display, and in this case what you see as violet is actually light from an ultraviolet filter, blue is actually blue, teal is blue-green, green in the image is actually yellow-green light, and near-infrared is displayed as red. In addition, they used a filter that lets through a very narrow slice of red light where hydrogen and nitrogen atoms glow brightly, and those are abundant in gas clouds. That’s also colored red in the image, so these gaseous star-forming factories really stand out.

Back in the day (the late 90s, mostly) I tried my hand at making color Hubble images, and I never got the color balance right. On the other hand, I’m no expert in using that kind of software (like Photoshop). Many other people are, and I appreciate not just the beauty of their images but the amount of work that goes into it as well. That’s one reason I like to give some details on it when I can.

The deep sky is wondrous and gorgeous, and it only gets better when you understand what you’re seeing. I’m happy to oblige.

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