On April 1, 1995, at 4 a.m., the Maryland control center for the Hubble Space Telescope directed the bus-size satellite to focus its eye on a distant object in the universe called the Eagle Nebula.
Two weeks later, as Arizona State University astronomer Paul Scowen fed the raw data from the telescope into a computer, it quickly formed an image on his screen so startling that he phoned colleague Jeff Hester. “You better get your butt in here,” Scowen told him.
The two scientists, the first ever to look upon the picture, were dumbfounded by the beauty of it, as have been millions of people since then.
The photo shows a nursery for baby stars nestled into giant pillars of hydrogen gas and dust reaching into a vast and mysterious cosmos. Popularly known as the “The Pillars of Creation,” it now is one of the great astronomical images of all time, one that continues to stir people to thoughts about God and the universe.
Photos of the Eagle Nebula and dozens of other planets, stars and galaxies–part of a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit celebrating Hubble’s first 10 years– are on display at the Adler Planetarium through June 28.
The Hubble has sent back thousands of images of celestial bodies. Some of the images look more deeply into the universe than ever before, helping rewrite astronomy textbooks.
Traditional earthbound satellites peer into the heavens through the distortions of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is akin to a swimmer at the bottom of a deep pool peering up at the figure of a person standing at the pool’s edge, said astronomer Paul Knappenberger, president of the Adler.
“Hubble takes us above the Earth’s distorting ocean of atmosphere,” said Knappenberger, “giving us the clearest look we can get of outer space.”
In the case of the Eagle Nebula, for example, it had been photographed before by land-based telescopes, but never with the precision that Hubble could capture it. Thinking it was a place that might lend insight into star formation, Hester and Scowen asked for time using the Hubble to look at the Eagle Nebula in 1995.
The Hubble is at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with every second carefully planned out. It is in so much demand that the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble for NASA out of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, denies five of every six requests to use it.
Hester and Scowen’s request passed muster. Seeing the resulting photograph, they knew it was scientifically important. But their first reaction was to tell others of the beauty of the image.
“We spent the rest of day going up and down hallways of Arizona State, knocking on people’s doors, telling them to come and see what we got,” said Hester in a telephone interview last week.
The Hubble sends back images in black and white.
For scientific purposes, Hester and Scowen had Hubble observe the nebula in wavelengths that recorded the presence of three key elements–oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur. They colorized the photo by using reds for sulfur atoms, green for hydrogen and blue for oxygen to help them understand the dynamics of their interaction.
“We used the colors that way,” said Hester, “because it allowed us to see what was there, to see the information that our minds could perceive. The colors, it turned out, are not true color, but suggestive of what the naked eye might see, and it also turned out to be aesthetically appealing.”
Immediately after the Hubble was put into orbit in 1990, the designers discovered its 100-inch mirror surface had been ground imperfectly, effectively making the telescope near-sighted. It could not properly focus on distant objects.
The Hubble became a butt of comedians’ jokes about over-hyped technology and misspent research money.
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In 1993, a space shuttle mission corrected the Hubble’s vision, and the space telescope began performing even beyond its creators’ expectations. To the public, however, Hubble was still a joke.
In late 1995, Hester and Scowen released the Eagle Nebula photo to the news media. Overnight, it changed public perception of the Hubble.
“The time was right to show the public how this telescope has changed our view of the universe,” said Knappenberger.
The resulting 5,000-square-foot exhibit will travel to the Space Center in Houston, the Strategic Air Command Museum in Nebraska, the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Science and New York’s American Museum of Natural History after leaving the Adler.
The exhibit introduces visitors to the four realms of Hubble’s research: planets, stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. To this end, the exhibit uses the telescope’s astounding photographs, many blown up to a massive scale.
There are photos showing Earth’s sister planets in exquisite detail; stars being born, blowing up, dying; young and old galaxies; entire galaxies colliding with each other.
One of the most striking images is called the “Hubble Deep Field.” As an experiment in 1995, astronomers picked out a tiny speck of the universe that seemed mostly dark and void.
“To imagine how small an area it is,” said Knappenberger, you can hold up a dime at arm’s length, and the telescope was focused on a spot in the sky the size of President Roosevelt’s eye on the dime.”
In addition to the Smithsonian exhibit, the Adler developed its own companion show in its Zeiss Sky Theater in which it reproduces the Hubble’s colored images across the theater’s 68-foot diameter dome.
Edwin Hubble, the early 20th Century astronomer, surely would appreciate the excitement and awe his namesake telescope has generated as it opens entirely new vistas in space. When asked what he hoped to find looking through the most powerful new telescope of his day, he answered: “We hope to find something we hadn’t expected.”