The Hubble Space Telescope is named after Edwin Powell Hubble, the greatest North American astronomer of all time. Hubble (1889-1953) read Law and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford U.K. where he joined Pershing's Doughboys for WW1 as a Major. Hubble studied Cepheid variables in the spiral galaxies and determined the Andromeda Spiral at 900,000 light years away, later corrected to 750,000 light years, however, Hubble determined distance was linked with recessional velocity. The Hubble Constant relates the speed of recession of the galaxies to their distance from Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope orbits Earth at 600km altitude and since its launch in 1990 has thoroughly transformed our knowledge of the Universe.

The early stage of galaxy formation was observed in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image obtained by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope for a million seconds (11 days) at an area determined to be unexciting. The long term analysis of this image confirms that vast numbers of small galaxies distally located may serve as fuel for the present day existing galaxies such as the Milky Way.

Hubble provides crystal clear astronomical images free of the Earth's distorting atmoshere and will continue in this manner until 2012.

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