This summer, the Niles-Maine District Library is your ticket to interstellar exploration! Join us in the Franklin Gallery for Hubble & Webb: Portraits of Our Universe, an exhibit featuring over thirty stunning images originally captured by NASA’s famous space telescopes. Hubble & Webb has temporarily converted our gallery space into a cosmic viewing area that allows patrons to experience the wonder and beauty of our universe, all without leaving the third floor.
Thoughtfully curated by Library staff members, this exhibit aims to highlight the artistry of astronomy. Clouds of dust, swirls of ice, and exploding stars loom from the void, creating breathtaking celestial formations. Our favorite part of Hubble & Webb is that visitors can enjoy the exhibit both for its scientific merits, and as a purely visual experience. It is not necessary to have an understanding of math or science in order to appreciate these photographs. Patrons will find descriptive title cards next to the prints to provide scientific context for the images.
We hope that patrons of all ages will feel inspired by the scientific and artistic qualities of these photos. Hubble & Webb: Portraits of Our Universe will be viewable in the Franklin Gallery through the end of summer, so there will be plenty of opportunities for patrons to explore the exhibit while it’s on display.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, and has been taking photographs of space from Earth’s orbit ever since. Hubble can detect both visible and ultraviolet light, and its deployment gave scientists their first clear look at the cosmos free from the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere. Over three decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021. This second telescope now orbits the sun with Earth at a distance of roughly one million miles from our planet. With a bigger mirror than Hubble and the ability to detect infrared light, Webb can see objects that are much dimmer and farther away, giving us an even more detailed picture of the history of our universe.
