Presentation Abstract

Presentation Number 97.06
Presentation Time: Sunday, May 22, 2011, 11:10 AM -11:30 PM
Title Edwin Hubble's Famous Plate of 1923, and a Hubble-Hubble Connection
Author Block David R. Soderblom1
1STScI.
Abstract On October 6, 1923 Edwin Hubble used the Mount Wilson 100-inch telescope to take a 45 minute exposure of a field in the Andromeda galaxy. This is the now-famous plate marked with his "VAR!" notation. I will discuss this plate and that notation. I will also tell the story of flying copies of that plate on the deployment mission for HST in 1990 as a Hubble memento and then locating those copies afterwards, and how copies were flown on Servicing Mission 4 on 2009 as well. This has led to an effort in which AAVSO members joined to identify and reobserve that noted star, arguably the most important object in the history of cosmology, but largely ignored since Hubble's time.