Alright everyone, bit of hush, bit of hush. Now we're here todat to celebrate a very special birthday, someone who brought us pictures like this, and this, and even this. Oooh, sorry everyone. That's better. So, without further ado, ladies and lenses, let's say an intergalactic happy birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope. Oh, it's in space isn't it?
Yep, zooming around the earth at about 30,000 kays an hour, the Hubble Space Telescope is literally out of this world, and that's kinda what makes it special. You see, down here on Earth, our view of the stars and planets is kind of blurry, because of the way light bends and shifts as it passes through our atmosphere. This is why stars appear to twinkle, and why a lot of super big telescopes are built on mountains, where the atmosphere is a lot, lot thinner.
Back in 1946, a guy named Lyman Spitzer thought we could do better than mountains. He wanted to go above the atmosphere.
Of course, that wasn't a simple task, and it took decades of research and trials, and space triumphs, and space disasters, before finally, on April 24th, 1990, the Hubble Telescope was sent into space. But when the first pictures came back, things weren't quite right.
The mirror which reflected all the light into the telescope was ever so slightly off, I'm talking 1/50th of a human hair off, but this meant all of the images were blurry. After a few years of serious calculations, astronauts were sent into space to give Hubble some glasses, and all of a sudden, our universe snapped into focus
Since the fix, there have been some astounding, and simply mind-boggling pictures come from Hubble. From the birth of new stars, to the death of old ones, but no picture was more astounding than this. This is the Hubble Deep Field, and it's a series of images taken in 1995. Scientists pointed Hubble at a tiny speck of sky, that looked empty. But after 10 days the results blew them away. Each little dot in this image is a galaxy, and not only that, some of them are galaxies more than 12 billion light years away.
But Hubble was never designed to last forever. Back in 2009 NASA launched one last mission to upgrade and repair it. Meanwhile, it's been working on a replacement. The James Webb Telescope which will hopefully launch next year. But, for the moment at least, the Hubble is still up there, showing us our universe, and reminding us just how small we really are. And thus, the cosmic ballet goes on. Anyway, who brought cake?
