1999 Isaac Newton/Hubble Space
Telescope
Part of a Millennium Series set of four
devoted to the achievements of British scientists, and jointly
called The Scientists’ Tale, this stamp carries the
wording “Newton/Hubble Telescope”. It honours the
work of Isaac Newton (already the subject of a
set in 1987), but the image is a
false-colour infrared view of Saturn taken by the Hubble Space
Telescope. The intention was to demonstrate the development of
astronomical telescopes since Newton built the first reflector
– but surely a more appropriate illustration would have
been either Newton’s original telescope or the
present-day Isaac Newton Telescope in the Canary Islands.
(Incidentally, this isn’t a poor-quality copy of the
stamp – the perforations really were that rough.)
The stamp, numbered “Millennium
1999/17”, was released on 1999 August 3 and then reissued
eight days later as a four-stamp sheet to mark the total eclipse of the Sun visible from Britain on August 11. No designer is
credited.
The other advances commemorated in the
Scientists’ Tale set were:
19p, DNA decoding (1999/20); 26p,
Darwin’s theory of evolution (1999/19); 44p,
Faraday’s work on electricity (1999/18).
Stanley Gibbons no. 2105