Hour 1, “The Mystery of the Milky Way”, chronicles the history of telescopes, from Galileo's refractor to Newton's reflector and beyond. It looks at key discoveries, such as those made by William Herschel and his sister Caroline, including the discovery of the planet Uranus. It also looks at recent missions: the voyage of the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn, the Kepler telescope's search for planets beyond our solar system, and the Herschel Space Observatory's examination of the Milky Way, which is so large that it would take 100,000 years traveling at the speed of light to cross from one edge to the other.
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 is the first image of a celestial object taken with the newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope.Hour 2, "The Ever-Expanding Universe," introduces a new generation of ever-larger telescopes that is poised to reveal answers to longstanding questions about our universe—and, in turn, to raise new questions. NOVA investigates a battery of high-tech telescopes that is joining the Hubble Space Telescope on its quest to unlock the secrets of our universe, a cosmos almost incomprehensible in its size, age, and violence.
Yerkes Observatory largest refracting telescope NOVA: Hunting the Edge of Space, Wednesday, beginning at 9 p.m. on PBS-HD.
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