Astronomical instruments for the study of UV astronomy have been developed for NASA missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The systems that are `blind to the visible' (`solar-blind') yet sensitive to the UV that have been flown in satellites have detective efficiencies of about 10 to 20%, although typically electron bombardment charge coupled devices are higher at 30 - 40% and ordinary CCDs achieve 1 - 5%. Therefore, there is a large payoff still to be gained by further improvements in the performance of solar blind UV detectors. We provide a brief review of some aspects of UV astronomy, UV detector development, and possible technologies for the future. We suggest that a particularly promising future technology is one based on the ability of investigators to produce high quality films made of wide bandgap III-V semiconductors.