We’ve just spent the past few months creating a show about Hubble Space Telescope science. It was produced mainly for planetariums, but I’d love to see it get out into classrooms, if we could just figure out a way to market it. Astronomy’s such a cool subject and people always want to know more about it. Of course, the beauty of astronomy, in addition to the great pictures and wonderful science results flowing from every observatory on (and above) the planet, is that there’s always something new coming up.

In the case of Hubble Space Telescope, the discoveries keep marching down the pipeline and putting together a planetarium show (or any kind of presentation about HST) is kind of like holding a bucket under a firehose and gathering in as much as you can until the bucket overflows. I had a wealth of images to choose from, but still, it was a tough job just figuring out what NOT to use! Ultimately I ended up selecting a couple of hundred images in the first cut, winnowing that down to just under 200, and then adding in some graphics and other visual material. Then it was time to produce! The story just wrote itself. Seldom does it just flow out as it did with this one. I guess that’s a sign of goodness; I know from experience that sometimes writing isn’t so easy and the words don’t always come tripping out of the word processor like they did for this one.

But then again, the inspiration I get from HST, and really from ALL observatories, is endless. I just go hold that bucket out and see what I gather up from the datastorm descending on us from the sky every second!