Our enduring fascination with outer space

The glowing dots in the night sky have enthralled for as long as people could look skyward. Our desire to figure out what makes the stars blaze and why some of the celestial bodies move in strange ways has sparked centuries of conjecture, observation and exploration, from the simple telescope Galileo used to observe Mars in the early 1600s to the new James Webb Space Telescope, a 14,300-pound behemoth with a mirror so big it had to be folded up to fit into the launch vehicle.