Hubba hubba Hubble!

(This is the kind of post I would expect to see over on e-clecticism, so hopefully jono will forgive me for this parking of scooters on his lawn!)

So, the magnificent Hubble telescope is 20 years old. For me, the Hubble and the images it produces of deep space (and, hence, the distant past) are one of the Wonders of the Modern World. A truly extraordinary technological and scientific feat. The Grauniad newspaper (ok, The Guardian) has an excellent and interesting narrated slideshow (from yesterday) about Hubble and its discoveries here. Apologies that you have to follow a link, but there didn't seem to be an option to embed the article (and I'm ham-fisted about this stuff, if it isn't obvious). But go on, have a look, and gawp, open-mouthed, at the deep space pictures produced by this massive peeping tube in space. It is staggeringly difficult to comprehend the spatial scale of some of these structures in deep space, when the narrator says something about the little blobs on one image being of the order of a light year across.





Screen dump from the Guardian website (Copyright: The Guardian)

 
And if you really like these views of deep space, you can see much, much more here, on the NASA Hubble site.



Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI