Who Gets to Look Out to the Edge of the Universe?
For years, more men than women were allowed to use the world's most powerful telescope—until the system changed.
The cosmos would seem like a dull and desolate void if it weren’t for the Hubble Space Telescope. The space-based observatory has revealed a trove of colorful, cosmic wonders, from sparkling stars and galaxies, to glowing clouds of gas and dust, to the glittering shards left behind after a supernova. Hubble has found these cosmic jewels scattered across the universe and followed them back in time, reaching almost to the Big Bang.
The work behind this celestial catalog begins back on Earth, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland. Each year, the institute receives more than 1,000 proposals from scientists around the world asking for a piece of Hubble’s busy observation schedule. The process is quite
