Hubble Vision: Further Adventures with the Hubble Space Telescope Book

The Hubble Space Telescope--more an orbital observatory than a single device--is entering middle age. No one seriously expects it to be de- orbited later than 2010. Since April 1990, and especially once the distortions to its mirror were corrected (for its first three years it was referred to, notoriously, as the hobbled Space Telescope), the HST has been one of the most heavily used and over-subscribed pieces of scientific kit ever built. The results of its intensive use by teams all over the world, observing and analysing everything from asteroids to colliding galaxies to dark matter, are summed up in this second edition of Hubble Vision. Exquisitely reproduced as the observational images are--and it would be a hardened soul indeed who was not moved by the full-page image of the Eagle Nebula, where sunlight from a near neighbour is boiling off the gas clouds from around tiny, newly formed stars--Hubble Vision is much more than a mere visual feast: astronomer John C Brandt explains how data from the HST is refining, confirming and in certain crucial areas challenging current astronomical and cosmological theory. The text is clear but demanding. The word "fun" crops up three times in the preface: "[We] marvel at the luck we have in being able to have so much "fun" doing our jobs!"--but the lasting impression of Brandt's account is of hard graft, determination and intellectual rigor finally, after many years, reaping in hundreds of thousands of exposures its problematic, puzzling and beautiful reward. --Simon IngsRead More