Did you ever peer at the night sky and wonder what it would look like if we could really see it – closely and clearly? Well, that’s what our November speaker brings us:  views of space as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

A  fine nature photographer in  his  own  right,  Zolt  Levay  is Imaging Group Lead in the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He studied astronomy  at  Indiana  University  in  Bloomington  and  Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. He then worked on several space  science  missions  at  NASA’s  Goddard  Space  Flight Center  before  joining  STScI  in  1983  to  develop  science analysis software.

Since 1993, Zolt has been a member of the News Team in STScI’s  Office  of  Public  Outreach.  His  responsibility? Transforming Hubble Space Telescope data into aesthetically attractive images and graphics to illustrate Hubble’s science discoveries  (http://hubblesite.org).  Zolt  leads  the  Hubble Heritage Project (http://heritage.stsci.edu), which is a team of astronomers at STScI whose goal is to establish a repository of the visually finest Hubble imagery.

It’s hard to imagine that Zolt has any spare time, but when he does, he enjoys exploring and photographing wherever and whenever he can. His Flickr site shows the beauty and breadth of his images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zoltlevay

Note: Zolt Levay speaks to us this month thanks to a tip from SSCC member Elise Shurie