20 years of Hubble
The Hubble Space Telescope celebrates two decades taking spectacular snaps from orbit on April 24.
Discovery Magazine is showcasing some of the more over-looked images like the one above of the Carina Nebula.
Although it is some four times as large and even brighter than the famous Orion Nebula, Carina Nebula is much less well known, due to its location far in the Southern Hemisphere.
It was discovered by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1751-52 from the Cape of Good Hope.
Nicolas is noted for his catalogue of nearly 10,000 southern stars, including 42 nebulous objects.
This catalogue, called Coelum Australe Stelliferum, was published posthumously in 1763. It introduced 14 new constellations which have since become standard. He also calculated a table of eclipses for 1800 years.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
