Hubble Vision: Astronomy with the Hubble Space Telescope

Abstract

The phenomenon of spherical aberration received a lot of attention in the summer of 1990 when NASA realized that its two billion dollar telescope did not work as expected. The small but significant spherical aberration in the main mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was a big blow to NASA. However, its pride was justifiably restored with the bold but very successful repair mission of December 1993. The story of the development of the HST and the subsequent fixing of its optics is told in the first chapter of this excellent book, but the majority of the book is given over to explaining just what science the HST has been doing. The second chapter describes the various instruments on board and the remaining four chapters cover the Solar System, stars, galaxies and cosmology. The HST took its 100000th exposure in June 1996. About 100 of the best and most informative of these (the majority in colour) are reproduced here, along with a similar number of other illustrations. This is not just a book of pictures though. There is plenty of detailed (but non-mathematical) text to explain the observations and to put the science in context. The various types of stars are described and their evolution in terms of the Hertzsprung - Russell diagram, classifications of galaxies are explained and there are actually a dozen pages at the start of the cosmology chapter before we reach the details of the HST's contributions. The HST's best photos have been taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera, but the other main instruments on board are the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the Faint Object Spectrograph and the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS). The High Speed Photometer unfortunately had to be sacrificed to make space for COSTAR, the box of tricks that deploys special mirrors to correct Hubble's vision, but not before it had made useful observations. In fact much useful work was done with the HST before the First Servicing Mission in December 1993 fixed the optics and the jitter of the solar panels, e.g. the FOC image on page 159 of the expanding shell of Supernova 1987A. The spectra of stars and galaxies contain a wealth of data and some of the ways in which this information is extracted are explained in the book. The HST is particularly useful in the ultraviolet because this is heavily absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere; an example is a high resolution (≫ 1 Å) spectrum on page 218 taken by the GHRS which allowed a more precise estimate of the abundance ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the interstellar medium than previously available. Jupiter is one of HST's most targeted objects and the visual highlight of the book for me was the excellent photos from the HST of the 'Great Comet Crash of 1994'. The book is very well produced with few errors, the only notable one being where the luminosity of the Sun is quoted in units of 'watts per second'. The book is sensibly concluded with a ten-page glossary, references and an index. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in astronomy to see just how the Hubble Space Telescope contributes to current research.