Monday, June 8, 2015
The Hubble Space Telescope’s discoveries over the last 25 years have revolutionized our understanding (actually our ignorance) of the cosmos and forced the rewriting of the astronomy textbooks. People are mesmerized with its pictures: no other scientific instrument has the name recognition or was adopted by the public in this manner. Before joining AIP’s Education Division, Daniel Golombek worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA HQ on all aspects of the science operations of Hubble.
Recently Golombek published El Telescopio de las Estrellas: El Hubble y los Enormes Observatorios del Siglo XXI (The Telescope of the Stars: Hubble and the Huge Observatories of the 21st Century). In this lively book written for general audiences, Golombek tells the story, operations, and instrumentation of Hubble and the other three NASA Great Observatories (Chandra, Compton, and Spitzer), and especially about the discoveries they made. It also covers the current ground-based observatories, the James Webb Space Telescope, for example, and the next generation of space- and ground-based observatories in construction or being planned.
The book is published, in Spanish, by Siglo XXI Editores. More information or to buy the book (currently only in electronic form, paperback is forthcoming), can be found here.