Hubble's Famous Plate of 1923: a Story of Pink Polyethylene

Volume 40 number 1 (2012)

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David R. Soderblom

Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218; soderblom@stsci.edu

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.