Edwin Hubble; Mariner of the Nebulae

New York: Farrar , Straus and Giroux, 1995. Second Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 24 cm. x, [2], 420 pages. Illustrations. Notes and Abbreviations of Frequently Used Sources. Bibliography. Index. Minor wear to DJ and minor edge soiling noted. Gale Edward Christianson was a professor emeritus of history at Indiana State University. He received a DA in history from the Carnegie Mellon University in 1971. He joined the faculty at Indiana State University in 1971, was promoted to professor in 1979, and was named a Distinguished Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1987. Gale Christianson was an internationally known and honored historian of science. He demonstrated the uncommon ability to combine prodigious research and analysis with topics and a style that gave his work a broad audience. This combination was particularly evident in his highly regarded biographies. His publications included: Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming; Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae; In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times; Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution; Isaac Newton; Fox at the Wood's Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley; The Night Country (with Loren Eiseley); and This Wild Abyss: The Story of the Men Who Made Modern Astronomy. His books have been translated into many languages and printed in over a dozen countries, including Turkey, China, Korea, Spain, and India. Edwin Hubble was chosen one of the Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times, and one of the year's five best books in science by Carl Sagan in the Washington Post. Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 - September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as "nebulae" were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way. He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period (discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt) for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances. Hubble provided evidence that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from the Earth, a property now known as "Hubble's law", despite the fact that it had been both proposed and demonstrated observationally two years earlier by Georges Lemaître. The Hubble-Lemaître law implies that the universe is expanding. A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities. Hubble's name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope, which was named in his honor, with a model prominently displayed in his hometown of Marshfield, Missouri. In 1919, Hubble was offered a staff position at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California, by George Ellery Hale, the founder and director of the observatory. Hubble remained on staff at Mount Wilson until his death in 1953. Shortly before his death, Hubble became the first astronomer to use the newly completed giant 200-inch (5.1 m) reflector Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California. Hubble also worked as a civilian for U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during World War II as the Chief of the External Ballistics Branch of the Ballistics Research Laboratory during which he directed a large volume of research in exterior ballistics which increased the effective firepower of bombs and projectiles. His work was facilitated by his personal development of several items of equipment for the instrumentation used in exterior ballistics, the most outstanding development being the high-speed clock camera, which made possible the study of the characteristics of bombs and low-velocity projectiles in flight. The results of his studies were credited with greatly improving design, performance, and military effectiveness of bombs and rockets. For his work there, he received the Legion of Merit award.