can command a robotic observatory while lounging at home .
10 . Most professional astronomers now work that way too , operating telescopes remotely with computers and rarely looking through an eyepiece .
11 . Long time coming : NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 , seven years late and $ 2 billion over budget .
12 . Hubble ’ s eight-foot light-collecting mirror had to be polished continuously for a year to an accuracy of 10 nanometers , about 1 / 10,000 the width of a human hair .
13 . Unfortunately , the contractors polished the mirror precisely wrong , off by a painful 2,200 nanometers .
14 . Since the problem was fixed in 1993 by installing corrective lenses , Hubble has become the source of roughly 25 percent of all published astronomy research papers .
15 . Telescopes that pick up radio waves , not visible light , got their start in 1932 when engineer Karl Jansky noticed that the static plaguing his equipment varied on a daily schedule . His antenna was picking up celestial radio sources rotating in and out of view .
16 . In 1965 engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were also bugged by microwave static , this time from every part of the sky . After eliminating poop from roosting pigeons as the cause , they realized they ’ d discovered the cosmic microwave background , the Big Bang ’ s afterglow .
17 . See for yourself : Tune an old analog TV to an empty channel . Much of that “ snow ” is from the cosmic microwave background .