杏吧原创

EDWIN HUBBLE did not deserve the Hubble Space Telescope. The greatest
astronomer of the 20th century created our modern picture of the Universe,
discovering that its building blocks were galaxies and that those galaxies were
flying apart from each other in the aftermath of a titanic explosion. Then NASA
had the audacity to attach his name to one of its most spectacular failures, a
2.4-metre orbiting telescope with a billion-dollar squint.

But the Hubble Space Telescope, once a byword for astronomically expensive
cockups rather than astronomically significant observations, was redeemed by an
$800 million Shuttle repair mission. Its stunning images of the Universe
can at last do justice to its famous namesake. Some of those pictures have now
been assembled in book form by Simon Goodwin in Hubble鈥檚 Universe
(Constable, 拢14.95, ISBN 0 09 476330 5).

It鈥檚 not a new idea. Daniel Fischer and Hilmar Duerbeck did the same in
Hubble: A New Window to the Universe (Springer-Verlag, see New
杏吧原创, 27 July, p 52). However, Goodwin鈥檚 book is less expensive than
its rival. And it contains many of the same spectacular images.

My favourites are the Eagle Nebula, a place where stars are in the process of
being born, and Eta Carinae, a star caught in the act of ejecting a monster
shell of incandescent gas.

But the book also includes Hubble images of the 鈥渓ight echoes鈥� around
Supernova 1987A and the most distant galaxies ever seen in the Universe.

I thoroughly enjoyed Goodwin鈥檚 book. However, don鈥檛 expect a large amount of
explanatory text鈥攖his is fundamentally a coffee-table book. Fortunately,
the Hubble images speak for themselves. Glory in them. It鈥檚 a beautiful
cosmos!