Edited by Gerald Boerner
Commentary:
Edwin Hubble may not be a household word, but most school children have heard about the Space Telescope named after him. We have probably heard of the need of this device requiring “glasses” of sorts; an error was made in the optics which required a special shuttle mission to correct. And correct it indeed was the result!
While the Hubble Space telescope was designed years after Edwin Hubble’s death in 1953. However, He was well-known for his concept of an expanding universe that resulted from its creation at the “Big Bang”. His futures contributions involved the speed of expansion being related to the color emitted, based upon the “red shift” of the color which became Hubble’s Law. Stephen Hawking observes that Hubble’s "discovery that the Universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century."
Although he worked on two of the largest telescopes at his time, the Hooker Telescope at Mt. Wilson and the Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar. These scopes both represented the best optics available at the time. But the atmospheric conditions in Southern California hindered the images that could be seen; photographic films and cameras had not yet reached the refinement needed for recording the extremely faint images required. The Hubble Space Telescope solved that atmospheric condition, as can be seen in the image below.
One of Hubble’s most famous images, Pillars of Creation
shows stars forming in the Eagle NebulaFor your convenience we have included a couple of YouTube videos that illustrate Hubble’s concepts. Please take time to see them; they require Adobe Flash, so those using iPads
willmay need to access them from another computer. They have been tested on a iPad and they played OK.So, let’s get on to our exploration of Edwin Hubble… GLB
These Introductory Comments are copyrighted:
Copyright©2010 — Gerald Boerner — All Rights Reserved[ 3742 Words ]
Quotations Related to EDWIN POWELL HUBBLE
“The great spirals… apparently lie outside our stellar system.”
— Edwin Powell Hubble
“The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.”
— Edwin Powell Hubble
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”
— Edwin Powell Hubble