skies – it simply rotates around the pole once every twenty-four hours and never sets below the horizon at high latitudes. If in your mind’s eye you put the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia upright, then just beneath the rightmost ‘V’ you will be able to see quite a large, faint, misty patch in the sky. It is comparable in brightness to most of the stars surrounding it, although dimmer than the bright stars of Cassiopeia. This unremarkable little patch is, in my view, the most intellectually stunning object you can see with the naked eye, because it is an entire galaxy beyond the Milky Way. It is called Andromeda, and is our nearest galactic neighbour. It is home to a trillion suns, over twice as many stars as our galaxy. It is roughly twenty-five million million million kilometres (fifteen million million million miles) away, and here is the connection.
This Homo habilis skull was found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and is believed to be around 1.8 million years old.
PASCAL GOETGHELUCK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Two and a half million years ago, when our distant relative Homo habilis was foraging for food across the Tanzanian savannah, a beam of light left the Andromeda Galaxy and began its journey across the Universe. As that light beam raced across space at the speed of light, generations of pre-humans and humans lived and died; whole species evolved and became extinct, until one member of that unbroken lineage, me, happened to gaze up into the sky below the constellation we call Cassiopeia and focus that beam of light onto his retina. A two-and-a-half-billion-year journey ends by creating an electrical impulse in a nerve fibre, triggering a cascade of wonder in a complex organ called the human brain that didn’t exist anywhere in the Universe when the journey began
AlltheSky.com
On autumn and winter evenings, the spiral galaxy M31 (Andromeda) is visible to the naked eye in northern skies. To locate it, you first need to identify Cassiopeia, and its distinctive ‘W’ shape. Using the point of the ‘V’ on the right-hand side as an arrow, look beneath it for a large misty patch in the sky.
NASA
Observing the night skies with the naked eye can only take us so far on our journey to discover and understand the wonders of our universe. Advances in technology have brought us crafts that can take humans on expeditions beyond our planet, but also sophisticated equipment that has changed our view of the Universe entirely.
The Hubble Space Telescope being repaired by an astronaut from Endeavour. This eleven-tonne telescope has allowed astronomers and scientists to see further into our universe than ever before.
NASA
THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE
The naked eye can only allow us to travel back in time to the beginnings of our species; a mere 2.5 million light years away. Until recently, Andromeda was the furthest we could look back unaided, but modern, more powerful telescopes now enable us to peer deeper and deeper into space, so that we can travel way beyond Andromeda, capturing a bounty of messengers laden with information from the far distant past.
In the history of astronomy, no telescope since Galileo’s original has a greater impact than the eleven-tonne machine called Hubble. The Hubble Space Telescope was conceived in the 1970s and given the go-ahead by Congress during the tenure of President Jimmy Carter, with a launch date originally set for 1983. Named after Edwin Hubble, the man who discovered that the Universe is expanding, this complex project was plagued with problems from the start. By 1986, the telescope was ready for lift off, three years later than planned, and the new launch date was set for October of that year. But when the Challenger Space Shuttle broke apart seventy-three seconds into its launch in January 1986, the shutters came down not only on Hubble, but on the whole US space programme. Locked away in a clean room for the next four years, the storage costs alone for keeping Hubble in an envelope of pure nitrogen came to $6 million dollars a month.
With the restart of the shuttle programme, the new launch date was set for 24 April 1990 and, seven years behind schedule, shuttle mission STS-31 launched Hubble into its planned orbit 600 kilometres (370 miles) above Earth. The promise of Hubble was simple: images from the depths of space unclouded by the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. A new eye was about to open and gaze at the pristine heavens, but within weeks it was clear that Hubble’s vision was anything but 20:20. The returning images showed there was a significant optical flaw, and after preliminary investigations it slowly dawned on the Hubble team that after decades of planning and billions of dollars, the Hubble Space Telescope had been launched with a primary mirror that was minutely but disastrously misshapen. Designed to be the most perfect mirror ever constructed, Hubble’s shining retina was 2.2 thousandths of a millimetre out of shape, and as a result its vision of the Universe was ruined.
Such was the value and promise of Hubble that an audacious mission was immediately conceived to fix it. This was possible because Hubble was designed to be the first, and to date only, telescope to be serviceable by astronauts in space. A new mirror could not be fitted, but by precisely calculating the disruptive effect of the faulty mirror, NASA engineers realised that they could correct the problem by fitting Hubble with spectacles.
The Hubble Space Telescope has had a greater impact on astronomy than any other telescope. This huge telescope orbits Earth, sending back images of parts of the Universe that would otherwise remain invisible to us. The telescope has been orbiting Earth since 1990, and its revolutionary and revelatory journey continues to this day.
NASA
In December 1993, astronauts from the Shuttle Endeavour spent ten days refitting the telescope with new corrective equipment. In charge of the repairs, by far the most complex task ever undertaken by humans in Earth orbit, was astronaut Story Musgrave. Already a veteran of four shuttle flights, a test pilot with 16,000 flying hours in 160 aircraft types, ex-US Marine and trauma surgeon with seven graduate degrees, Musgrave is quite an extraordinary example of what people can do if they put their minds to it. He is a metaphor for the space programme itself; in Musgrave’s own words, this is what restoring sight to Hubble meant. ‘Majesty and magnificence of Hubble as a starship, a spaceship. To work on something so beautiful, to give it life again, to restore it to its heritage, to its conceived power. The work was worth it – significant. The passion was in the work, the passion was in the potentiality of Hubble Space Telescope.’
Seven years behind schedule, shuttle mission STS-31 launched Hubble… A new eye was about to open and gaze at the pristine heavens…
On 13 January 1994, NASA opened Hubble’s corrected eye to the Universe and opened the eyes of our planet to the extraordinary beauty of the cosmos. A decade late and costing around $6 billion dollars, it has proved to be worth every cent
The Hubble Space Telescope has brought us incredible images of other galaxies that we might never have been able to see. This shot of the spiral galaxy NGC1300 is one of the largest images taken by the telescope.
NASA
