Origins: Our Place in Hubble's Universe

When most people hear the name "Hubble," they immediately think of NASA's costly snafu involving the flawed optics on the billion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope. Award-winning science writer John Gribbin and research astronomer Simon Goodwin have done their best to honorably exonerate pioneering astronomer Edwin Hubble's name by putting together this thoughtfully documented collection of eye-grabbing images, primarily from the now-corrected HST but also from other space- and ground-based telescopes and detectors.

Edwin Hubble made one of the most dramatic discoveries in all of science: that of the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. This laid the groundwork for understanding the very origins of the universe (the Big Bang). For many years, evidence supporting the Big Bang hasn't been much to look at--just blurry photographs and squiggles from electronic detectors. But the current crop of detectors and telescopes, chief among them the Hubble, has changed all of that: this book takes advantage of that technology to map out the origins of our universe with a dazzling series of extraterrestrial images. Tracing the history of time through space, this series starts with distant quasars and then zooms in through swirling galaxies and murky nebulas, finally arriving back in our own solar system. These last shots, taken largely by somewhat outdated probes not far from home, are surprisingly among the most striking in the book. --Paul Hughes