Happy Anniversary, HUBBLE!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 30 years since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit on April 24, 1990. On the whole, they’ve been very good and productive years, despite the mission’s rocky beginning. Without it, our knowledge of the universe would be less advanced than it is today.

Following Hubble from the Beginning

HST has played a big role in my life, and I’ve followed it avidly through the decades. For several years, I was a student at the University of Colorado, working toward a graduate degree. During part of that time, I was also a member of the HST/Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph team led by friend and co-author John C. Brandt. I joined the group about a month before launch, although I’d been working for him for a couple of years on comet images for a big atlas we were producing. Working with HST data and proposals (as I hoped to do) was a big incentive to join his team. (I go into more detail about that job and my first impressions of HST in this entry from 2015. And, you can search out many other stories I’ve done here by typing “Hubble Space Telescope” in the search box.)

The day of launch was pretty exciting. I remember watching from home (since it happened in early morning). Then, we waited for the first-light images. Our team leader shared some concerns they were having with focusing the images. Eventually, through persistent questioning and investigation by such folks as Dr. Sandy Faber and others, the bad news came out: the telescope’s mirror had a problem called “spherical aberration”. It meant the main mirror was ground precisely wrong and that images would look incredibly fuzzy and out of focus.

The news was devastating. We talked about what effect the spherical aberration would have on our instrument. It was not good. But, over time, as we all know, the HST teams were able to come up with ways to treat the images and data to pull out as much data as they could. And, eventually, the telescope started returning the “pretty pictures” that we all craved. It made my secret ambition to collect good images and information a bit easier.

Telling a Tale of Hubble Science

I began working on an article that then became a possible thesis topic, and eventually a book. Hubble Vision was published in 1995, just a few short years after launch and the first servicing mission. It was the first book to focus almost exclusively on HST science and it was written to share Hubble’s scientific achievements with the general public. My goal was to tell the tale of the telescope’s history, and then focus on the science story, not gossip and politics. I invited Jack to join me as the second author, and between us, we told a compelling tale of discovery. I’m still very proud of it.

Other writers made more money selling negative stories, but I felt good talking about the science. No matter how hard it was to get. I still write about HST science today, and it’s still cranking out good science. My most current book, The Discovery of the Universe, examines it as part of a family of space- and ground-based observatories that together continue our exploration of the cosmos.

Hubble’s Views of the Universe

I left the GHRS team when I graduated, and have since gone on to write about Hubble’s imagery and science many times in articles, books, and in this blog. Nothing the telescope sees fails to amaze me. Even the blobbiest-looking elliptical galaxy that HST shows us has a compelling story to tell. Throughout the 30 years of its mission, HST has studied the closest planets and the most distant objects in the observable universe. It taught us to see beyond our preconceptions of the cosmos, to learn that there are still new things to discover “out there.

Hubble’s First Deep Look

The first image that really took my breath away in Hubble’s early days was the very first Hubble Deep Field. This “core sample” of a tiny spot in the sky near the constellation Ursa Major, blew people away. I remember standing in front of it at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 1996, marveling at the detail.

Essentially, astronomers used Hubble to peer across billions of light-years, back to a time when the universe was very young. The Deep Field showed that galaxies exist as far as we could see. Some of them looked like shreds of galaxies, others looked fully formed.

The success of that image led to other deep field observations, in other directions of the universe. As far as we can tell, it’s galaxies (and their precursors) all the way out. And, today, thanks to HST, we have a much better idea of conditions in the early universe, back when the first stars and galaxies began to form.

That, to me, is one of the many incredibly enduring legacies that Hubble Space Telescope and the astronomers who’ve used it have created. I was pleased to be able to put it in the second edition of Hubble Vision. I also used later deep field images taken by the telescope in a very popular fulldome show about HST, now in its own second “edition”, called Hubble Vision 2.

Hail Hubble!

I encourage everybody to check out the many gorgeous images and news stories about the Hubble Space Telescope amassed by the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute. They maintain a fantastic news site and have created a celebration page featuring links to great images, videos, and articles.

Help celebrate 30 years of remarkable achievements. Like everyone else who has ever met an obstacle and succeeded despite it, the Hubble Space Telescope and its science teams and astronomer-users have done the same. In the process, they have brought us new looks at the ever-changing universe.

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