Meet Edwin Hubble in a Hubble 25th Anniversary
The famous Hubble Space Telescope marks 25 years of observations in April 2015, and that anniversary is in part being celebrated in a new series of educational videos created by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) of Baltimore, Maryland, who manages Hubble on behalf of NASA. The second video in the series is called "The Original Hubble."
The "Original Hubble" video provides a quick glimpse at the life of Edwin Hubble, the astronomer the famous telescope is named after. The video provides an overview of Edwin Hubble's life from his birth in 1889 in Missouri to his education and transformation in his career path that led to a fascination with the cosmos.
While pursuing his doctorate, Hubble gained employment at the Mount Wilson Observatory, the world’s largest telescope at the time. Don Nicholson, a 94-year-old docent at the Mt. Wilson Observatory met the famous scientist when his father worked at the observatory in the 1930s and 1940s. Nicholson spoke about meeting Hubble. “He saw the changes that were going on in astronomy and that opened his eyes," Nicholson said. "He got interested in it and the interest became pretty consuming.”
The video covers Hubble's focus on interstellar clouds of dust and glowing gasses, and his 1923 discovery of the first variable star in the Andromeda Nebula, now known as the Andromeda galaxy, and that the star could be used to calculate its distance from Earth. He applied the same technique to other spiral nebulae and discovered that our universe extends far beyond our local Milky Way. Hubble also found the universe was expanding and the rate in which it is occurring, was later coined "the Hubble Constant." That expansion became the foundation of the "Big Bang."
“I think having the Hubble Space Telescope really seals the fame for Edwin Hubble. It does keep his name in the forefront and it helps him to be one of those people that really gets remembered from the 20th Century," said Owen Gingerich, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The 6 minute and 5 second video was produced by STScI. The "Hubble 25th Anniversary" video series is available in HQ, large and small Quicktime formats, HD, Large and Small WMV formats, and HD, Large and Small Xvid formats.
For more information about the Hubble telescope With over 1.5 million observations and 20,000+ papers published on its discoveries, Hubble is the most productive science mission in the history of NASA. Yet the story of Hubble’s success starts before NASA even existed. It includes adversity, human ingenuity, heroic spacewalks, risk taking, and discovery. Learn the background of one NASA’s most famous missions.