He employed male staff to analyse all the data being collected from the observed sky, and he got so angry with his incompetent staff he declared that his maid could do better. The male staff asked him to prove it, so Pickering got his maid to do the work, and she was better than them, working out how to measure the distance from the Earth to the stars and learning they were much too distant to be part of the Milky Way, and had to be part of another galaxy outside of our own and it was part of an expanding Universe forming the basis of what became the big bang theory.
He also made up stories about fighting a bear, saving two women from drowning, got a friend to inflict slight scars on his face and claimed they were the result from a duel and smoked a pipe because he thought it looked British as well as speaking with a fake British accent but the best scientists are eccentric and it is fair enough they named such a magnificent piece of Astrological equipment after a man who made some of the most important discoveries in modern astronomy.
Launched today in 1990, and once they fixed the mirrors which had been installed the wrong way around, the Hubble Space Telescope has provided us with some of the magnificent space pictures such as the 'Pillars of Creation' and many distant Stars.
The Hubble Telescope has now reached the end of its life and has been replaced by the James Webb telescope, which is larger and more sophisticated than its predecessor and named after the NASA administrator responsible for the Apollo program to land humans on the Moon.
Seems a fine person to have a telescope named after him until you remember he was part of the persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s and '60s so a name change has been considered but it shouldn't be that hard to find a suitable replacement.
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