www.astro.ljmu.ac.uk http LJMU’s ‘Public Lectures in Astronomy’ series saw its inaugural lecture, delivered by Dr Robert Fosbury of the European Space Agency, bring the Hubble Space Telescope to life with images and videos previously unseen by the public. The lecture presented the story of Hubble, looking back on the revolution in astrophysics that it has achieved and forward to what it is achieving now in its probings of the early history of the universe to the study of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. Renowned for its beautiful images, the Hubble Space Telescope has been a great success for NASA despite a defective mirror that nearly ended the mission when the problem was detected after launch in 1990. Hubble is used to create images from the Universe’s visible light, free from the distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. It also has instruments that detect invisible infrared and ultraviolet radiation. Hubble is one of NASA’s four Great Observatories, the others being the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It is now some hundred times more powerful than when it was launched in 1990. LJMU runs ‘Astronomy By Distance Learning’, a selection of life-long learning courses that can be taken by students who do not have any specialist scientific or mathematical background. These are multimedia courses taught using a variety of media such as interactive CD-ROM material, videos, DVDs, websites, online astronomy …