Think You Know Hubble? Top 10 Things You Don't Know
The 'People's Telescope' in the Movies, Album Covers, Museums and More
In Hollywood, Hubble's a Star, Too
2. Like us, Hubble can't look directly at the sun.
Hubble has photographed every planet in the solar system, with one exception: Mercury.
The solar system's innermost planet is too close to the sun for Hubble to observe. The sun's bright light would permanently damage its optics and electronics.
Mercury's angular separation from the sun is always less than 28 degrees, which means that it's never out of the sun's glare and, therefore, off limits for the Hubble.
3. It's a pop-culture icon.
Hubble and its images have also had their share of cameo appearances in Hollywood flicks and TV shows.
When "Naked Gun 2 1/2" came out in 1991, Hubble was still a national laughingstock.
In the movie, it was pictured in the Blue Moon Cafe on a wall of failures, smack in the middle of the Titanic and the Hindenberg.
Imagery from Hubble has also been spotted in the movies "Happy Feet" and "Contact."
For the album cover of its 2000 release "Binaura," Pearl Jam used an image of Hubble's "Hourglass Nebula."
The 'Pioneer of the Distant Stars'
4. Hubble's namesake almost chose the law over astronomy.
When the U.S. Postal Service released a special 41-cent for Edwin Hubble in 2008, they called him a "pioneer of the distant stars."
But Hubble was close to choosing another path for himself. Born in Missouri in 1889, Hubble studied math and astronomy as an undergrad but then went on to study law as one of the first Rhode Scholars at Oxford University.
He reportedly moved to Kentucky to practice law. But the pull of the cosmos was too great. Hubble spent most of his career at California's Mt. Wilson observatory.
He is credited with many discoveries but most notably for observing that the farther apart galaxies are from each other, the faster they move away from each other. Based on this, Hubble concluded that the universe expands uniformly.
When the Hubble Space Telescope launched, one of its goals was to figure out this expansion rate, called the Hubble Constant.
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