Submitted by lluncheon on Tue, 2015-12-22 11:59
I have a picture of the Lagoon Nebula as the screen saver on my computer. It’s so beautiful, so full of color, that it’s hard to imagine that something so stunning is part of what we see when we look up at the stars at night. The Hubble telescope of course makes it possible to see myriad images we’re blind to without it. Hubble: Imaging Space and Time (National Geographic, $50), by David DeVorkin and Robert W. Smith, explores the history of the telescope and the way it operates. It’s also full of beautiful pictures of nebulae, planets, galaxies, and supernovas, among other things.