The odd journey of Edwin Hubble's famous plate, from Pasadena to Baltimore to space and back

This is a story with a happy beginning, a long and dull middle, and a not-fully-satisfying ending. On October 6, 1923, Edwin Hubble took a 4x5 plate of a field in M31, the Andromeda Nebula, using the largest telescope in the world, the 100-inch Hooker reflector on Mount Wilson. This plate famously shows a “VAR!” annotation added to note his discovery of he first extragalactic Cepheid, critical to showing the universe extended beyond the Milky Way. In 1985, I had just begun at STScI, and I talked to Allan Sandage, who had worked closely with

Hubble, about the upcoming deployment of the Space Telescope named after Hubble, and about the possibility of including a personal memento of Hubble’s on that flight of the Space Shuttle. As a result, the Carnegie Observatories loaned Hubble’s plate to me, and I had film copies made, with the idea of later presenting them to the organizations that had played

central roles in building and launching the telescope that was anticipated to revolutionize astronomy. I arranged with the ST Project office at Marshall Space Flight Center to include

them on the Space Shuttle. But, just a short time after HST’s deployment, the expectations for the telescope were dashed by finding that the primary mirror had significant spherical aberration, and any hopes of celebration were to be, at best, delayed. We all know how corrective optics turned HST from an apparent failure into a breathtaking success.

But in this talk I will recount the story of those film copies and my efforts to recover them over the intervening years. I will also explain why I feel that the “VAR!” was not a spontaneous act of emotion by Hubble, but instead was added later for effect. And as a follow-up to Edwin Hubble’s original discovery, in December 2010 and January 2011 I was part of a team that used HST to observe Hubble’s variable number 1 in M31, and I will describe that effort. And maybe even show how Superman saved Space Telescope too.