The Universe in a Mirror

By Robert Zimmerman. This is the interesting story of the Hubble Space Telescope: the long process from conception to funding to building to launching to mistakes and fixing them and then to finally oberserving the universe from beyond the constraints of the earth's atmosphere.

There were lots of interesting pieces in the story of how we have Hubble. It's amazing that it ever worked at all. I am reminded of a quotation from a 5 year old girl I knew in NYC who was obsessed with space. "NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1992 but there was a glitch." A glitch indeed.


But the best part of the book was the chapter on what we have learned with Hubble. And the accompanying photos. They are truly amazing. One of my favorites was where Hubble was trained on a supposedly blank section of the sky. This is what Hubble found. No, those aren't stars, those are GALAXIES! This picture gives me goose bumps.



Hubble has given us photographic evidence for the vastness and grandeur of the universe. Looking at a galaxy like this one--the Sombrero Galaxy--from the vantage of Hubble and Earth feels a little bit like some kind of omniscience.



Even more breathtaking to consider are the amazingly distant objects that Hubble has been able to observe, providing a look back in time. Because of the time it takes light to travel, observers on earth aren't able to see objects in the sky until their light reaches us. Hubble has been able to observe phenomena that are BILLIONS of light-years away. What that means is that astronomers are literally able to look back in time to BILLIONS of years ago to places where star formation is going on (or should I say "was going on"???) at a furious pace. Time all of sudden feels very different from the linear and simultaneous earth-perspective of time.