The Red Limit

"Timothy Ferris is a great writer. The Red Limit is the beautifully told story of the first mind-boggling leaps in discovery that 20th century astronomers gave us through the development of bigger and better telescopes. Whether you’re talking about Edwin Hubble in the 1920s – realising that there are other galaxies out there, and that we are all flying away from each other in the rush of cosmic expansion – or if you’re talking about today, when we analyse the data from the Hubble space telescope and find that 95% of the universe is made of dark energy and dark matter, which is still unexplained, it’s awe-inspiring to think about it. Particularly when you’re standing under a night sky full of stars. Absolutely. Putting your eyeball up to a telescope is a personal exploration. But as far as adding to the knowledge we have as human beings, for that we turn to the giant telescopes we have in Hawaii and other place, and the ones that are in orbit, above the atmosphere. The follow-on telescope to the Hubble, the James Webb space telescope, is designed to look further out in space to the most distant galaxies we can find. One of the things that is so compelling about astronomy and space exploration is that it really is an endless frontier. There’s never going to be a final destination or discovery. I think of Apollo as the opening act in a story that has no end."