Hubble Space Telescope

I had a chance to go to the National Air and Space Museum for the AAS banquet last night. Before dinner, we had a chance to wander around and look at the exhibits in the museum.

As usual, I gravitated to the Hubble Space Telescope model and the exhibit that features its back-up mirror and a special presentation of the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 that is on temporary loan to the museum. I had a nice long time to stand there and contemplate the telescope that was a large part of my graduate school experience — and, of course, my writing experience.  Back in graduate school I worked as one member of a large team that supported and used one of the original instruments on the telescope — the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph. This instrument used the telescope to study objects in the universe in ultraviolet light. It was eventually removed from the telescope, but while it was deployed, GHRS turned out some seminal science.

When I decided to write Hubble Vision (my first major science book, with co-author Jack Brandt) and also the planetarium show that is showing in facilities around the world, it was clear to me that I needed to show people that astronomy is a multi-wavelength endeavor — and that most people don’t know that fact.  And, given the gorgeousity of HST’s optical images (and those from optical telescopes on the ground), that’s completely understandable.

These days, we are rather more used to seeing imagery created from observations in all wavelengths. People are more used to such visions, and that idea stimulated the book Visions of the Cosmos (that Jack and I also co-authored).  We enjoyed bringing a new vision of the universe to readers, and I think the days of knowing the cosmos only through the wavelengths our eyeballs can see are coming to an end.

Well, all these thoughts ran through my mind as I stood looking at the HST model last night. That telescope set me on a path that I could never have foreseen — an interesting and twisty path, but an ultimately rewarding one. Those thoughts — and memories of the early days of HST, the problems, the triumphs, the team meetings, the work we did — all seemed, paradoxically fresh — and old — at the same time.   One of these days, I’ll go to NASM and maybe our instrument will be an exhibit. I’ll feel really old, but it will also be a testament to the work that thousands of people did for many years to bring another vision of the cosmos to our senses.