How many power of magnification is Hubble?

When you look at binoculars and telescopes for hobby use, they always tout the power, 'My 30 inch Dobsinian has a 500 power lens' or my binoculars are 20 power and I can see the moons of Jupiter, etc.
So with the latest round of technological upgrades of the Hubble, what is the # of the power of magnification of the best new photos, like the new ones showing galaxies almost 13 billion LY from here?

Don't know, but the Hubble Telescope website says:

"People often mistakenly believe that a telescope's power lies in its ability to magnify objects. Telescopes actually work by collecting more light than the human eye can capture on its own. The larger a telescope's mirror, the more light it can collect, and the better its vision. Hubble's primary mirror is 94.5 inches (2.4 m) in diameter. This mirror is small compared with those of current ground-based telescopes, which can be 400 inches (1,000 cm) and up, but Hubble's location beyond the atmosphere gives it remarkable clarity."

http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/

he's talking commercial brands below, but it's still interesting.

----

http://www.scopereviews.com/matrix.html

Telescope Ranking Matrix

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx

Microsoft Worldwide Telescope

Experience
WorldWide Telescope
Immerse yourself in a seamless beautiful environment.
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Experience narrated guided tours from astronomers and educators featuring interesting places in the sky.
A web-based version of WorldWide Telescope is also now available. This version enables seamless, guided explorations of the universe from within a web browser on PC and Intel Mac OS X by using the power of Microsoft Silverlight 3.0.

nice pics and article.

---

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4299775.html
By Andrew Moseman
Published on: January 23, 2009

The 5 Most Powerful Telescopes, and 5 That Will Define the Future of Astronomy

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning a looking glass to the sky and shaking up humanity's view of the heavens. Then, puny telescopes could see moons, planets and the occasional celestial body. Today, huge lenses like those in the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit probe the deepest reaches of the universe. Here are the five most powerful telescopes out today, and five more that will define the future of astronomy.

Keck Observatory, HI
Hubble ST
Spitzer ST
Large Binocular Telescope, AZ
Fermi Gamma-Ray ST

Kepler ST (planet hunter)(April 2009 launch)
Atacama radio array, 2012
James Webb ST (Hubble's successor), 2013
Giant Magellan T, Chile, construction to start in 2011
Thirty-Meter T, Chile or HI, in design.

Originally posted by zeeblebot
nice pics and article.

---

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4299775.html
By Andrew Moseman
Published on: January 23, 2009

The 5 Most Powerful Telescopes, and 5 That Will Define the Future of Astronomy

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning a looking glass to the sky ...[text shortened]... iant Magellan T, Chile, construction to start in 2011
Thirty-Meter T, Chile or HI, in design.

When you compare eyeball scopes, binoculars, and such, the standard binocular at 7X50 is 7 power and 50 mm diameter primary lens. That number is based on the size of the pupil which means the light coming out of the telescope or binocular closely matches the size of the opening in the pupil, I recall a # like 2.5 mm or such. So if you take a 50 mm lens and force it to be 14 power, the light is in a smaller cone and so the circle you see covers less of your visual field. Also, a rule of thumb is the max magnification is something like 2 times the diameter, so the max you can expect out of a 50 mm lens is about 100 power but with a 50 mm lens that means the image would be a pinprick size, like looking through a pinhole in a paper. So if you wanted 100 power and still have the full size image going through the pupil, it would have to be about 15 times larger than 50 mm (100/7=14.2) so 15 times 50 would be = to about a 20 inch (750 mm) sized primary lens. That makes a X100 image fill your pupils. So for a hubble, if you were using it like a pair of binoculars (which of course is impossible, being in orbit) a 2.4 meter (2400 mm primary/50=48) which is the # that you would multiply times the 7 power of the 7 50 standard which would make the power only about 350 times! That is only the power that would be useful for human eyes, but you could get 3500 power if you confined the light to a cone 1/10th the size of the full pupil opening. So my question I guess would be the technical issue of what is the effective size of the exit image in the longest range image, which is about 13 billion light years out. Using that # you could tell the effective power of magnification.