The Hubble Space Telescope: Our Eye on the Universe

Terence Dickinson is well-known to backyard astronomers; his NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe was first published in 1983 with a 4th edition issued in 2006. For fifteen years, he edited Canada’s astronomy magazine, SkyNews. His large-format Hubble’s Universe: Greatest Discoveries and Latest Images was first published in 2012 by Firefly Books and reissued in a 2nd edition in 2017. Many of the images that appeared in this 300 page coffee-table book are reproduced in the current volume that has been carefully written for a junior audience, with Tracy C. Read, who was Dickinson’s editor for Hubble’s Universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope: Our Eye on the Universe is an attractive work with copious colour images, most taken by the Hubble, but including a few images captured by earth-based telescopes or other spacecraft, notably New Horizons that sent back stunning pictures of Pluto and its largest moon Charon in 2015.

The first chapter is crucial for understanding the rest of the book. It introduces the Hubble’s history, main features, telecommunication relay system, and some sister research instruments, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope scheduled for launch in 2021 that will have seven times the light collecting power of the Hubble and infrared vision that the Hubble currently lacks. No mention is made of the Kepler Space Telescope that was featured in Megan Kopp’s Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System. The chapter includes a four-page glossary of words and phrases that are central to astronomy. Terms range from asteroid belt, dark energy, Messier catalog, to white dwarf star. The terms also appear in the index along with other many others. The definitions are clear and age- appropriate. For example:

Galaxy. A stellar city containing vast numbers of stars, nebulas, planets and comets as well as huge quantities of gas and dust, all held together by gravity. Galaxies may be found on their own or in clusters. Astronomers estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. The galaxy we live in is called the Milky Way.

Star, nebula, planet, and comet all have their own entries in the glossary. Spectograph is one term absent from both the glossary and index, but it appears in the text with an explanation in parentheses. This demonstrates the authors’ attention to the intended readership. Nevertheless, readers should have some basic knowledge of chemistry, physics, and the Solar System.

The chapter on the Solar System demonstrates one of the Hubble’s contributions: documenting weather systems of planets from Mars to Neptune. Hubble cannot capture images of Mercury and Venus because their orbits are too close to the Sun and the sensitive instruments of the telescope would be destroyed by the intense heat and light of the Sun if pointed toward it. Another limitation of Hubble is shown by the lack of detail in its images of Pluto, a body that is too far away and too small for good imaging. Sidebars used throughout the volume provide additional information related to the nearby images.

The chapter “Inside Our Galaxy” features star clusters, nebulas and the Milky Way. Cosmic galaxies beyond the Milky Way are the focus of the fourth chapter. The final chapter is the shortest. It briefly explores the deep dark past as Hubble looks at very distant galaxies. The text accompanying each of the images vary from no more than an identifying caption to an information packed paragraph recounting astronomical events and facts, such as age of the object, distance in light-years from the earth, or imaging techniques such as the use of filters and stitching of images.

By its nature, The Hubble Space Telescope: Our Eye on the Universe has a choppy structure that may have limited appeal despite the high quality images that one can only marvel at, especially given that most readers in urban centers cannot see much of the night sky due to light pollution. A second read of The Hubble Space Telescope reinforced the information value of the book. The price is fair for a book of this size and with so many colour images.