Room with a View

Why put a telescope into space?

It is a simple question, but it also has a simple answer.

The atmosphere.

It is the reason why stars "twinkle". The best way to explain this is also simple. Dive into a swimming pool an look up. What you see is a distorted version of what you know to be "up there" because the water swirls and distorts the image.

Earth's atmosphere is just like that, the only differences being that it is a lot less dense, but far "deeper".

A similar effect can be seen in large cities, especially New York and San Francisco. The normal lights of the night can be seen to be twinkling just like the stars do. The only difference here is that the view is horizontal. The twinkling is due to pollution this time.

So, we sent the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit to capture color images (of the Crab Nebula) like THIS: