Abstract
Patrick, a historian friend of mine, was interviewed this past April by a young reporter from the Pacific Standard. The occasion for the interview was the launch 25 years ago of the Hubble Space Telescope. What, the reporter asked Patrick, are the sources of the telescope's fame and significance?
I learned of the interview because Patrick turned to Facebook to vent about the reporter's seemingly short historical horizon: she had wondered how people looked at astronomy pictures before the Internet.
The question is more interesting than it might appear. Viewed through an optical telescope, stars, nebulae, supernova remnants, and other celestial bodies consist for the most part of bright, shining blobs of plasma set against the dark background of near-empty space. The iMac that I used to write this column has a 27-inch 2,560- × 1,440-pixel liquid-crystal display backlit by light-emitting diodes. As viewed on my screen, the Hubble images that ran online with the reporter's article look stunning.
Art book publisher Taschen marked the 25th anniversary of Hubble's launch with a coffee-table tome, Expanding Universe: Photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. The hardcover book measures 12 × 12 inches and contains 260 pages, some of which are foldouts. I haven't seen the book yet, but the individual pages excerpted in Taschen's latest print catalog look dull and flat compared to the same images viewed on my computer screen. The pixels of a computer's display literally shine; their ink-on-paper equivalents do not.
How people looked at astronomy pictures before the Internet has an obvious answer: on the printed page. The offices of Physics Today include a modest library. There, I found the lavishly illustrated Cambridge Atlas of Astronomy, which was published in 1985, the year of Hubble's originally planned launch date. The book is a masterpiece of graphic design; the explanatory diagrams are clear and colorful. The astronomical images of stars and galaxies, however, underwhelm.
I was inspired to be an astronomer in 1983 by a course I took in the final year of my physics degree. The source of my inspiration was abstract, rather than graphical. I was amazed at how deftly physics could describe the fate of the universe, the motions of stars, and the formation of galaxies. I can't recall reading any astronomy books as a child.
Besides their luminousness, astronomical images on the Internet have another advantage over their printed counterparts: availability. Images taken by Hubble and other US government-funded missions are freely available to the public. Anyone with an Internet connection can view them.
Whenever I receive an emailed press release about a new and scientifically significant astronomical image, I post it to Physics Today’s Facebook page. The page has 2.5 million fans, most of whom live in poor countries. Thanks to the Internet, cell phones, and social media, these fans can see and wonder at the latest images of roiling star formation regions, lacy supernova remnants, and wispy galaxies at the same time as everyone else. Given those riches, the reporter's seemingly naïve question to Patrick was valid.