Hubble is now 20 years old. It is expected to be in continued use until 2014 when it will be replaced with James Webb Space Telescope. Over its lifetime Hubble has captured some of our most beautiful views of our galaxy and beyond. It has helped solve as many mysteries/theories about our universe as it has created new ones! One of it’s main missions was to help accurately measure the Hubble constant (the rate that the universe is expanding, which also helps in determining its age).
Google Earth has the nifty feature of flipping your view of the world to the stars where you can learn a thing or two about constellations, as well as looking at many well known (and not so well known) images taken by the space telescope. This video is a nice overview of many beautiful images taken with this amazing instrument.
Although astronomy plays a much smaller role in navigation and surveying than it used to, it is still taught to geomatics students of survey technology. For example, with observations to a few stars from a thodolite, and a few other pieces of information (Lat/Long and/or time depending on what you’re solving for), you can determin a very accurate true north azimuth, or you relatively accurate location on the earth (if you happened to not know where you were while having a theodolite handy :P).
For example Willem Barentsz, a Dutch explorer and cartographer of the late 1500s, famous for searching for the northeast passage north of Siberia, used astronomic observations many times to help his navigation. It sounds like a cold trip, I wouldn’t doubt if he wished on a few of those stars while he was at it!
