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[i]Behind every pretty picture of the universe there is a lot of dirty work that had to be done to capture it. When I was covering the space program in the 1980s, at some point during every space mission a NASA public affairs officer would corral a few science reporters and ask what to do when the space telescope was finally launched. The space agency wanted to make sure its long-awaited and astronomically expensive telescope -- soon to be launched into orbit above the turbulent fog of the atmosphere -- made an appropriately cosmic splash. The advice from those of us in the press peanut gallery was always the same and simple: pictures -- cosmic postcards like the live pictures of other planets being transmitted from the Viking and Voyager spacecraft -- early and often. Little did I know how mortified the astronomers were by these suggestions. Having spent a decade or more of their lives building the telescopes and their instruments, they were terrified that somebody, some outsider, would take a ruler to one of those pictures and scoop them on some discovery -- something that had actually happened to one of the Voyager scientists.[/i]
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