Deep Space: New Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope Book

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in April 1990 and was one of the most expensive single science projects ever and cost over a billion US dollars. It was also an enormous disappointment, at least initially, as the images were blurred because of an error in the manufacture of a crucial mirror. Fortunately, as Goodwin and Gribbin tell us, the problem was solved in December 1993, by the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour when they installed "new optics which compensated for the flaws in the mirror." The new sharp images are stunning and Deep Space gives a selection of nearly 60 of them. They range from the brightest star, the so-called Pistol Star, discovered in the early 1990s, which is 100 times more massive than the Sun, to the most distant galaxy, 13 billion light years away and the spectrum of light from a black hole, the active galaxy M84. Each image is accompanied by a short text description on the facing page with cross-references to the glossary to explain the more technical terms used. Some of the images might be confusing to the uninitiated, they look like psychedelic or op art images thanks to the false colour and magnification used.Simon Goodwin is an academic astronomer at the University of Sussex an John Gribbin is a well known science writer and author of several books on astronomy. Together they have collaborated on previous collections of Hubble images such as Hubble's Universe to which this volume is a sequel. The text might be hard work for a novice but the pictures are inspirational. --Douglas PalmerRead More