The Hubble Space Telescope didn’t see a lot; its field of view was minuscule compared with the old 200-inch or new 10-meter behemoths on terra firma. But what it saw, it saw with a clarity that no other telescope could approach. Through a CCD camera on an earthbound telescope, a very distant galaxy appeared as a smudge of pixels. Subtracting the light of the galaxy to isolate the light of the supernova was difficult work; witness the four months Leibundgut needed to figure out that the “very faint” 1995K was a Type Ia. The high resolution of HST, however, would make a supernova pop out of its
...more
