A sharper eye on the stars above?
Thirty years ago on April 24,1990, the Hubble telescope, a joint partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), was launched into space. Using cameras, spectrographs and interferometers it gave us spectacular high resolution pictures of the cosmos.
These photos are commonly passed around on social and mainstream media.
This of course didn’t happen overnight but the scientific path is an interesting one.
It started with Ptolemy a mathematician and astrologer of Greek descent who lived in Egypt AD 100 to 170. There, he made observations about the night sky including the Earth, sun and visible planets. He determined that the Earth was the centre of the universe with the sun and planets moving around it and the motions determined in mathematical terms. This view became accepted fact for the next 1,300 years.
Then, Copernicus (1473 to 1543), a Polish mathematician and astronomer making his own astronomical observations, came to a completely different conclusion. His theory was that the sun was at rest at the centre of the universe and all the planets including the Earth revolved around it.
No one at this time conceived that there might be galaxies beyond our solar system — (Edwin Hubble, 1889-1953, taught us that.)
A century later in 1608 a momentous discovery was made by Hans Lippershey (1570 to 1619) an eye-glass maker from the Netherlands. Apparently watching children at play lining up concave and convex lenses in his workshop and making objects farther away look closer he invented a refractive telescope that had three times normal magnification.
A year later in 1609 (while Newfoundland’s first colony at Cupids was in its final planning stages) Galileo, an Italian mathematician and astronomer having knowledge of Lippershey’s invention created one that through trial and error achieved 20 times magnification.
But instead of training it on earthly objects he focused on the sky where he could see mountains and craters on the moon, four of Jupiter’s many moons and the rings of Saturn.
Galileo’s subsequent observations led him to conclude that Copernicus was right. This put him at odds with the Catholic church which at the time through its Inquisition was attempting to weed out protestant dissenters of Catholic orthodoxy. The church had supported the Earth-centre theory and had used sections of the Bible to support it.
Galileo escaped death but spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Fifty years later, in 1668, Issac Newton (1643 to 1727), a British mathematician, vastly improved on the eyeglass lens telescope by using mirrors instead. This reflective telescope was capable of considerably more magnification and clarity. Newton later developed calculus and formed laws of motion and gravitation that were accepted for over 200 years until challenged by Albert Einstein (1879 to 1955) in the early 1900s.
While there were many advances made in telescope technology in the 20th century, Earth-based systems — including those mounted on rockets and other space vehicles — were at a disadvantage due to various obstructive elements. Hence, in 1968 the U.S.A. launched the first Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, shortly followed by Soviet efforts and then the joint-agency collaboration around the Hubble telescope in 1990.
In 2021, the considerably superior James Webb space telescope, a joint effort between NASA, the ESA and the Canadian Space Agency is set to launch.
I wonder what Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo would have thought of it all?
Tom Hawco St. John’s