Hubble Telescope's amazing images of universe, now in coffee table book
Taschen's lavish tome is a stellar celebration of 25 years of Hubble's stargazing
Since the dawn of time, ancient stargazers and astronomers such as Galileo and Copernicus had to make do with a blurred view of the heavens through Earth's atmopshere, which distorts and blocks the light that reaches our planet.
But all that changed on April 24, 1990, when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched from Kennedy Space Centre.
From its perch in orbit about 560 kilometres above Earth, the telescope - roughly the size of a Hong Kong single-decker bus - for the first time provided a clear, unobstructed view of the universe, and the images it sent back over the following 25 years exceeded even the wildest expectations of its designers.
To mark the 25th anniversary, boutique publisher Taschen has collected some of the space telescope's most remarkable images in the coffee table book Expanding Universe, which not only dazzles with its technicolour portraits of distant galaxies, star-forming nebulae and supernovas, but also provides food for thought on our place in the universe.
