EYES IN THE SKY
SPACE TELESCOPES FROM HUBBLE TO WEBB
“This is no mere space history book”
AUTHOR ANDREW MAY PUBLISHER ICON BOOKS PRICE £10.99 / $17.99 RELEASE OUT NOW
Most of us will take certain truths about space and astronomy for granted, without really questioning why or how. We’ll scan NASA press releases for the latest space news and watch documentaries, but never consider why we measure astronomical distances in light years, or how the Hubble Space Telescope can take detailed photos of celestial objects trillions of miles away that we can’t even see with the naked eye. What we need is to sit down with an expert, pick their brains and have them explain everything in layman’s terms. That’s what we’ve got in the form of the latest book from astronomer, astrophysicist and How It Works contributor Dr Andrew May.
Eyes in the Sky is about the greatest space telescopes launched by space agencies – but mostly NASA – over the last 40 years or so. It’s broken down into eight chapters that largely deal with the different flavours of telescopes for different types of astronomy. This includes Hubble, of course, the venerable visible-light telescope whose glory days are behind it. There’s also Planck, which explored the origins of the universe and the esoteric sphere of the cosmic microwave background, and Kepler, the exoplanet hunter that scanned nearby stars and found orbiting planets using a very specialist technique. Last but not least, there’s the new kid on the block – the James Webb Space Telescope.
This is no mere space history book, though. May boils a huge number of complicated concepts down into something much more easily digested, such as describing what arcseconds are and how parallax works in relation to the way the Gaia space telescope – which has the exciting task of mapping the Milky Way and all its contents – calculates the distance to a celestial object. If you’re a science-fiction fan, you might have bumped up against the word ‘parsec’ a few times, which May also explains, then goes on to question this unnecessarily confusing term. It’s nice to know that an actual astrophysicist doesn’t understand why some use this instead of light years either. He also dips into the design decisions and politics behind some of the space telescopes, particularly Hubble, which nearly never happened, and the James Webb Space Telescope, with its controversial naming after a bureaucrat with a dark past.
Eyes in the Sky answers many of the questions we had about space telescopes – and many more that we didn’t even realise we had. It’s a fairly easy and fascinating read, suitable for teens and adults with a keen interest in space.