by heehaw » Sun Apr 24, 2016 5:12 pm
This, of course, is the most famous HST photo of all time! Just last week Senator Mikulski spoke to the Maryland Space Business Roundtable and reminisced that when the nightmare of spherical aberration had been discovered, she'd called HST a "technoturkey" - she said that word again - and how brilliant the recovery had been. I remember myself looking forward to the launch of HST and remembering that when I was a boy at summer camp, there was another boy who wore glasses. He told me he'd only been told a few weeks previously that he needed glasses, and that he'd gone to a movie a few days after getting glasses, and was astounded to find that movies had crisp images - he'd thought the blurring was intrinsic to the movies! We astronomers knew that, before HST, all our images of the Universe were blurred, and that with HST, for the first time ever, we would see the Universe as it really is! A pair of glasses for the whole human race! And thanks to Holland Ford and Bob Brown and others, glasses-sized lenses were added by astronauts to HST, and now, a quarter century later, the human race still has a crisp and glorious view of our Universe. Hallelujah!
This, of course, is the most famous HST photo of all time! Just last week Senator Mikulski spoke to the Maryland Space Business Roundtable and reminisced that when the nightmare of spherical aberration had been discovered, she'd called HST a "technoturkey" - she said that word again - and how brilliant the recovery had been. I remember myself looking forward to the launch of HST and remembering that when I was a boy at summer camp, there was another boy who wore glasses. He told me he'd only been told a few weeks previously that he needed glasses, and that he'd gone to a movie a few days after getting glasses, and was astounded to find that movies had crisp images - he'd thought the blurring was intrinsic to the movies! We astronomers knew that, before HST, all our images of the Universe were blurred, and that with HST, for the first time ever, we would see the Universe as it really is! A pair of glasses for the whole human race! And thanks to Holland Ford and Bob Brown and others, glasses-sized lenses were added by astronauts to HST, and now, a quarter century later, the human race still has a crisp and glorious view of our Universe. Hallelujah!