Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) Inducted - Tuesday, May 13, 2003 Sculptor: Sabra Tull Meyer Speaker: Catherine Hanaway Where is Edwin Hubble in the Hall of Famous Missourians? Born in Marshfield, Mo. in 1889, Edwin Hubble was one of the leading astronomers of the twentieth century. His discovery in the 1920s of countless galaxies which exist beyond our own Milky Way galaxy revolutionized the understanding of the universe and our place within it. By age 30, Hubble had earned an undergraduate degree in astronomy and mathematics, a legal degree as a Rhodes scholar, followed by a PhD in astronomy. In 1919, he began to work at Mt. Wilson Observatory in California researching nebulae, fuzzy patches of light in the sky. He created a system for classifying galaxies, a system called the Hubble tuning fork diagram. Shortly before his death, Palomar's 200-inch Hale Telescope was completed and Hubble had the honor of being the first scientist to use it. In 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope to continue studying the Milky Way and other galaxies.