Q&A: Chandra Mission

Q:
Do the Chandra photos only come in one or two a month, or do you take a lot of photos to get one?

A:
In a typical month, Chandra will take observations of approximately 35 different objects (we call them targets). Not all of them are complete observations, some of them are observed more than one time over a few months or more. Many observations do not yield beautiful images, they may be point sources or spectra of important objects. In order for us to post an image on the website, the data must be worked on for a long time by the scientists and then accepted for publication in a scientific journal. So the answer to your question is yes, Chandra makes many more observations than the one or two images posted to the website each month. More information on the process may be found here:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/faq/chandra/chandra-37.html