One of the amazing things about astronomy is that it mostly involves standing at one distinct point in the entire universe—Earth—and measuring properties of the light that happens to reach us here. That also means that our understanding of space deeply depends on the quality of the technology we've developed to look outwards, into the universe. In his dissertation on "Photographic investigations of faint nebulae," Edwin Hubble began: "The study of nebulae is essentially a photographic problem for cameras of wide angle and reflectors of large focal ratio."

When Hubble started his professional work in astronomy, in 1919, a new piece of technology—the 100-inch Hooker telescope—had just been put to work, at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where Hubble, too, was beginning to work. He pointed that telescope at nebulae and started taking pictures of them.

No one was quite sure what nebulae were, exactly. Their "essential features," Hubble wrote in his dissertation, were that "they are situated outside our solar system, that they present sensible surfaces, and that they should be unresolved into separate stars." But when he started looking at nebulae through the new, more powerful telescope, Hubble found that he could see stars—individual stars—in some of them, including Andromeda.