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View NASA Hubble Space Repair Live on the Web

By John McCormick  

People are getting pretty blaze about near-Earth space travel but when you stop to think about it this is really incredible - you can watch repairs on the Hubble Telescope live via the Web.

The easiest way to get this feed is probably to go to space.com and click on the LIVE From Space! Watch NASA's Last Mission to Hubble link.

Or you can go directly to nasa.gov.

Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 - September 28, 1953) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bahubb.html was an American astronomer famous for his work at the Mount Wilson Observatory where he developed a method of calculating the distance of nebulae and other distant objects, demonstrating that the universe was much larger than previously thought.

He did this be showing that a kind of variable star (Cepheid variable) had a period (changing brightness) directly related to its brightness, therefore by watching how fast it changes brightness you could determine how bright a Cepheid should be and compare than to its apparent magnitude and thereby determine how far away it is from Earth.

Before his work people thought objects such as the Great Nebula in Andromeda were part of the Milky Way instead of separate galaxies vastly far away.

Much of the work of the Hubble Telescope has been involved in determining just how old the universe is by measuring the most distant objects.

Every upgrade of the telescope has increased its resolution and light gathering power by about one order of magnitude (10X).

Wikipedia listing for Hubble:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble.

John McCormick is a reporter, /science/medical columnist and finance and social commentator, with 17,000+ bylined stories. Contact John through NewsBlaze.