From our Facebook page, the Hubble team with NASA and ESA are sponsoring a contest to find some of the hidden treasures in the vast stored archive of the Hubble images collected over the past 22 years. It actually consists of 2 parts. First is to find things that hasn’t been found by conventional processing or the original science team (they may have been looking for other things). The second part is to use some free tools that have been made available to process images and submit them. You can work on one or the other task.

What I found interesting is that a professional tool (FITS Liberator) produced by PhotoShop for the Hubble team has been made into open source (free) for participants to use. It’s already a powerful and useful package, but making it open-source, many programmers can contribute to make it even better. And the beauty is that you can use it without having to purchase PS. Now you can have a powerful tool designed specifically for astro-photography for processing your own images.

Prior to the contest, there were amateurs who scoured the archives looking for interesting things and making significant discoveries (like comets, supernova, galaxy collisions, etc) that hadn’t been seen or recognized by the original science team. But there are huge quantities of images which haven’t been looked at. This contest gives regular amateurs like you and me a better starting point for us to get into the “game” (more tools, info and help). Amateurs from all over the world are getting into this project – and you can too!

The main link with more info, images, software downloads and more can be found here.