I have a special affinity for the Hubble Space Telescope. Run by the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins University campus and developed in part by scientists at the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Hubble is closely tied to my alma mater. It also launched in 1990 and, to a 14-year old geeky kid who had just gotten his own telescope for Christmas, Hubble was incredibly cool. Now 20 years old, the telescope is on its last legs with just four more years of life expected before it is replaced by the infrared James Webb Space Telescope. Even at the ripe old age of 20, though, Hubble continues to amaze, and its galleries are well worth exploring on
Google Earth.
Although Hubble images have been available in Google Earth for some time, a
new tour of the available images is available from Google in honor of the 20th anniversary. The zooming capabilities are pretty remarkable and each part of the tour links to the relevant areas of hubblesite.org. The Cat’s Eye Nebula, for example, shown below,
is linked to information about its formation, high-resolution photos, video (shown below embedded form YouTube, but available as high-resolution downloads on Hubblesite), and additional resource links online. Continue:
http://asurl.net/9qX
