Story highlights Eclipses are a visible highlight of astronomy, one of the oldest of sciences, writes Robert Massey But astronomy is also a science that pushes technology to the limits, he says Massey: Astronomy reminds us that we are really a very small part of an enormous cosmos

Eclipses are a very visible highlight of astronomy, one of the oldest of sciences that has fueled the imagination of humanity since we became capable of complex thought, with monuments as old as Stonehenge in England marking the movement of the Sun and Moon across the sky, and early civilizations creating myths around the patterns of stars that make up the constellations.

Astronomer Robert Massey

That sense of wonder continues unabated in the modern era, though we sometimes seem more disconnected than our ancestors from the world (and universe) around us.

Children and adults alike visit observatories and planetaria, download images originating from spacecraft in orbit around planets, asteroids and comets, and grab the chance to look through a telescope without hesitation.

An early interest in astronomy inspired many of today's leading scientists and engineers, including Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society and a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, who found his inspiration through a telescope at the age of eight.

This is a science that pushes technology to the limits, eking out the faintest of signals and using complex techniques to put together models for worlds, stars and clusters of galaxies that we are unlikely ever to visit.

And these demands set the toughest of challenges. To take one example, the Hubble Space Telescope (named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble) will reach its 25th anniversary next month. Putting a telescope in space had been proposed as far back as the 1940s, a good decade before the Soviet Union's Sputnik transmitted its first pings from orbit.

Hubble construction began in the late 1970s, ready to be carried into orbit by NASA's space shuttle. Delayed by the Challenger disaster, the telescope finally entered service in 1990, when scientists discovered that its mirror was the wrong shape -- a flaw repaired by another shuttle crew who installed a correcting system three years later.

Since those early setbacks, the Hubble telescope has transformed astronomy. From its vantage point above the blurring effect of the Earth's atmosphere, it helped scientists discover that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, powered by a still mysterious "dark energy," sent back images of forming solar systems and planets around other stars, and showed that almost every galaxy has a giant black hole at its center.

More here:

Seeing beyond the stars: Why astronomy counts on Earth