Why was the legendary Hubble telescope once regarded as a joke?

The legendary Hubble telescope was once considered a joke. It is good to observe the stars with a telescope, but there is a problem, which is the interference of the atmosphere. We call it visible light visible to the naked eye. However, visible light is only a small part of all light. The following are the types of electromagnetic waves. Only the color parts of visible light are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple. Other infrared rays, ultraviolet rays, x-rays, etc. The human eye is invisible. The air we breathe is invisible, but the atmosphere is 1000 km thick, which is about the distance from Beijing to Shanghai. If you use a hand-held laser pointer to send a beam of light from Shanghai to Beijing, will Beijing see it? You can't see it.

A lot of light is scattered by air. 1000 km thick atmosphere will interfere with visible light and invisible light, so what will happen if the stars are observed from the ground? As long as you put the telescope out of the atmosphere and into space, there will be a new kind of telescope called space telescope. There are many kinds of space telescopes, staring at visible light in space, staring at ultraviolet light in space and staring at X-rays in space. They are all space telescopes, the most famous Hubble space telescope for observing visible light.

1946, Lyman Spitzer, a famous astronomer, described in detail the advantages of the space observatory over the ground observatory in his paper "Astronomical Observation Advantages Beyond the Earth". If you put a telescope in space, you can observe the infrared and ultraviolet rays absorbed by the atmosphere. Lyman Spitzer not only published this paper. He also took the space telescope as his research topic and devoted himself to the development of space telescope.

Therefore, he is considered as the father of space telescope. The appearance of space telescope enables astronomers to go beyond the limitation of ground conditions and observe objects in the universe, thus obtaining a clearer and broader observation range. However, space telescopes have existed for a long time. Although Spitzer put forward the concept of space telescope in the 1920s, it was not until the 1990s that the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space and observed all the time.