Spitzer Goes to the Olympics

Artwork inspired by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is making an appearance at this year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. No, it's not battling other telescopes for the "gold," but its observations are now on display as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad Festival.

The Spitzer art project, called "We are Stardust," was created by George Legrady, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The two-screen installation maps the sequence of 36,034 observations made by the space telescope from 2003 to 2008. Spitzer sees infrared light from the cosmos, capturing images of everything from comets in our solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Read more at http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2174

More information about Spitzer is online at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer.