Hubble Telescope's 20th Anniversary

When Galileo constructed his first telescope in the early years of the 17th Century, it allowed him to record the phases of Venus, to pick out spots on the surface of the Sun, and to discover the four moons of Jupiter that would later take his name.

But no early Italian genius of astronomy could ever have conceived of the images that today's most famous telescope have given us. Since the space shuttle Discovery left it dangling in the heavens on 24 April 1990, Nasa's Hubble Telescope has produced unfathomably beautiful photographs of expanding supernovas six light years wide; thousands-strong clusters of stars held together by their own gravity; far, far away galaxies resembling deep-sea creatures; echoing black holes and vast, glowing clouds of hydrogen gas, floating somewhere out in the dark.

Hubble has shown us that space is everything that we – or David Bowie, or Pink Floyd, or Stanley Kubrick, or George Lucas or, indeed, Galileo himself – always imagined it might be. The images of the universe that it has beamed back to Earth in its two decades aloft have validated and outstripped Star Trek, a thousand prog-rock LP covers, even that speech of Rutger Hauer's from the end of Blade Runner about "attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion." As far as we ignorant masses are concerned, its discoveries have turned science fiction into scientific fact... click to read more