Bunch of Amateurs (33 page)

Galileo quickly became adept at the difficult labor of grinding lenses himself and eventually bootstrapped his 3X telescope into 8X and then 20X. He initially went to the Venetian Senate to sell these
earliest telescopes as powerful military tools. Think of Galileo as the first modern defense contractor. Eventually Galileo also turned his hopeful moneymaker to the sky and observed moons circling Jupiter, confirming that not everything orbited the earth. And he recorded the phases of Venus, which only made sense if that planet orbited the sun.

Seeing just a little farther on than the last guy—always the motive and the goal of astronomy—often was, and still is, enough to refurbish whole neighborhoods of the cosmos and sometimes restructure the entire universe. Isaac Newton invented the “Newtonian” by using a mirror to reflect the light and then throw it off to the side—with another mirror, the “secondary”—and into the eyepiece. William Herschel made minor improvements in refining the parabolic shape of his mirrors and discovered Uranus.

After the switch from lenses (curved on two sides) to mirrors (only one side to shape), other telescope improvements led to Charles Messier in France discovering so many things he put a number of them in his Messier catalogue, still the primary “bird list” for any greenhorn astronomer.

No one has run the exact numbers, but it’s safe to say that much of the sky has been identified and named by self-motivated pioneers. Even today, when amateurism is supposed to be dead, lay astronomers range from Cindy Foote, a wife in Utah who’s confirmed the discovery of two exoplanets, to a number of eccentric talents such as Robert Evan, who is a Christian minister in Australia, and Koichi Itagaki, who runs a bean confectionary company in Japan. They both possess an ability to look at a night sky, then come back later and notice if any tiny change in the light has occurred. With this amazing visual memory, they’ve discovered, respectively, forty-two and fifty supernovas.

With such a constant army of novices stomping around the galaxies, monitoring asteroids and NEOs (near earth objects), coining homemade names, becoming storm chasers on Jupiter, providing
popular boosterism for the next NASA-launched probe—the universe is a different place entirely than it was not that long ago. We have, strangely, come to know this place. Things are named. Ever farther and more curious bodies are seen. Bizarre physics are being understood. The nearby earthlike exoplanet Gliese 581c (118 trillion miles away) has already earned a vernacular nickname, even though the scientific authorities refuse to recognize it: Ymir, named for the Frost Giant in Norse mythology known as the gravel-yeller. Slowly and in inches, perhaps, we’re taming this place with understanding.

Comets were once considered messengers of evil or, as Rene Descartes thought, alien visitors spying on us. The seventeenth-century French poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas wrote that the appearance of a comet signaled different, but always horrible, meanings to all classes of people: “To Princes, Death! To Kingdoms, many Crosses; To all Estates, inevitable Losses! To Herdsmen, Rot; to Plowmen, hapless Seasons; To Sailors, Storms; To Cities, Civil Treasons.”

Today, the menacing Hermes of space is as domesticated as an obese house cat. The arrival of a comet is now an occasion for parties out in a farmer’s pasture. When Hale-Bopp arrived, some friends and I carted a telescope to a meadow on the edge of town. We drank beer all night long and laughed in our folding chairs at our absurdly gargantuan universe, carrying on as if we were sitting in a backyard 13 billion light-years wide. It felt oddly cozy.

And that is what has changed since, say, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. All these large-scale structural discoveries, as well as so many massive cartographic projects to locate and categorize literally millions of galaxies and stars, have made the universe a little more, you know, doable.

The proliferation of amateur stargazers has mucked up the sky in a good way, with dilettantish hands. The old constellations—the ones most of us grew up learning in our backyards—turn out to be inept guideposts to finding anything in the sky. So they are slowly going
through a makeover. Our lives don’t involve a lot of dealings with water bearers (Aquarius), queens (Cassiopeia), lions (Leo), or—for most folks—chained ladies (Andromeda). Such characters, or at least their stories, were commonplace in the day-to-day chatter of a long-ago time.

A number of amateurs have thrown out new names for different shapes that make it a lot easier to aim one’s telescope on a dark night. You might not have heard of the Coathanger or the Mercedes-Benz, but you can probably guess what they look like in the sky. Amateurs know these DIY constellations as “asterisms.” Naming something is a claim of familiarity, even ownership, and has been ever since Adam took up the task of naming the animals and assuming dominion over “everything that creeps on the earth.” In a way that he could never have anticipated, Dobson himself is very much responsible for a kind of
coup d’univers
.

So far, credentialed astronomers and amateurs together have discovered more than five hundred planets outside our solar system—exoplanets. The professionals tried to keep the new names very sober and scientific-sounding. Officially they all bear Dewey decimal designations in the style of Bach’s Opus K551 (known to non-musicologists as the Jupiter Symphony) or Brahms’s First Symphony in C Minor, Op. 68 (aka Beethoven’s Tenth). The same happened with exoplanets. Scientists know the first exoplanet discovered in 1995 as “51 Pegasi b,” but the madding crowd insists upon sticking with Greek mythology, and informally they have named it for the ancient slayer of monsters Bellerophon. One exoplanet I am particularly interested in is formally known as HD 209458b. But the online hoi polloi have already dubbed it Osiris. The world of exoplanets, like a lot of the sky, just won’t hold still for proper scientists, anymore than any Wild West’s frontier town waited for the Chamber of Commerce.

The terminology of space tends toward terms like ESO 137–001 (the name of a galaxy in the Abell 3627 cluster) precisely because it’s
easier to order the world that way and because it feels so sciencey. But the other tendency in astronomy is playful, half-cocked, improvisational, at times childlike. The Cartwheel Galaxy, as well as the Cigar, the Sombrero, the Pinwheel, the Sunflower, and the Tadpole galaxies—all officially recognized now—could have been named by Bart Simpson.

The reigning theory of the origin of the universe is called the Big Bang—a phrase that originated as a schoolyard taunt and was meant as a put-down when “this big bang idea” was first sneeringly uttered in 1949 on a BBC broadcast by Frederick Hoyle, then the most prominent defender of the now abandoned “steady state” theory. And the Big Bang is now met with complementary theories hypothesizing the universe’s end that quickly were characterized as the Big Chill, the Big Crunch, and the Big Rip.

A new technical expression that came into usage recently describes a gassy formation in deep space. I am not making this up, the formal term is: blob. It’s real scientific jargon, just ask any astronomer at a university or a ten-year-old boy in a mud puddle. And the dopey, amicable terminology has a way of amplifying this effect, of making a place that is largely incomprehensible seem, on some abstract level, possibly familiar.

Take the big rocks loitering out past Neptune. If you aim your telescope properly, you can make out the really large ones, such as 68410 Nichols, 4659 Roddenberry, and 7307 Takei, named for, respectively, the communications officer Lieutenant Uhura aboard the
Starship Enterprise
, played by the hot actress Nichelle Nichols;
Star Trek
’s brilliant creator, Gene Roddenberry; and the spaceship’s helmsman Lieutenant Sulu, played by George Takei. Nothing quite scales our solar system down to the intimacy of a shag-carpeted ranch home quite like naming its secondary features after characters we came to know as sexually emerging teenagers.

And these aren’t slangy nicknames like some of the asterisms, but rather the official ones, declared and recorded by a delicious
bureaucracy known as the International Astronomical Union’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature.

“I am now a heavenly body,” Takei said upon hearing of the honor, winking knowingly at the rest of the universe

Attend any star party, call any astronomer, or chat online, and you will hear of groups of amateurs trying to pull off some kind of serious astronomy in their spare time. The Galaxy Zoo—hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers scanning the universe—has published some twenty scholarly papers.

One crowd I began to hear about—centered on a mobile home park in a remote stretch of central California—appeared intent on sparking a second Dobsonian revolution. Somewhere out there, amid the dry scrub, was a guy leading a small army of amateurs. They were attempting to create new amateur equipment that would inch them closer to all kinds of professional science, some of it abetting the search for habitable planets, including alien life.

“He has his eyes on one- to two-meter telescopes,” said Bill Hudson, a telescope manufacturer in Utah. On the Internet, his group was known as the “alt-az initiative”—a shorthand term referring to the Dobsonian mount they hoped to use on their telescopes. The idea made sense: Between the commonplace telescope (with a mirror the size of a large dinner plate) and those mountaintop mammoths in Hawaii or Chile one reads about (where the mirrors could occupy half a football field) was a world of amateur pursuits for those with mirrors roughly the size of car hoods. Here was the main obstacle:
A professional telescope in that mid-range size can run around $20 million.

But what if a team of garage obsessives could fiddle their way to a Galilean leap, crafting a Dobsonian version—cheap, portable, and big—from various bits and parts that cost only a few thousand dollars? I wanted to know what kind of discoveries might flow from such an advance, this time arming a worldwide platoon of eager astronomers with mirrors nearly as powerful as Mount Palomar’s. And, since this work was currently under way, here’s what really got me to buy my Jet Blue ticket to California: Would I be able to see, up close, what the reality of a true innovative breakthrough looked like? Would I witness an amateur discovery in real time?

That would depend on whether I could find the Rinconada Trailer Park. The leader of this group, Russ Genet, lived there, and he warned me that there were a couple of curves in the road where reality and the MapQuest printout didn’t quite sync. “If you see a gas station on your right, you’ve gone too far”—and, whoosh, was that a gas station? Frustration inaugurated my trip to the odd trailer park and quickly developed into a leitmotif. Looking innovation square in the face turns out to be like spotting a shooting star, fairly gone by the time you see it.

My imaginative idea of a village of inventors at work in their sheds was belied by my visit. The Rinconada Trailer Park, for instance, had, besides Genet, only one other tenant, the landlord himself—giving the visit a Hitchcockian air. When I parked my rental in a spacious area, I was told I had to move it since the patch of grass I was on apparently qualified as the owner’s “parking space.” I was shown my sleeping quarters, a tiny, cozy travel trailer that, given its quaint size, made me feel like I had snacked on Alice’s famous “EAT ME” cake.

Genet’s a big man, with a white leprechaun’s chin strap for a beard. He’s full of smiles and zealous gestures. He is generous with his laugh—a room-engulfing yuk. He’s a skillful carpenter who clearly enjoys jimmying anything at hand. The room he added on
to his wide-load is an impressive piece of DIY construction and carpentry. We sat out in front of his house on a warm sunny day with sandwiches and iced tea—my first day behind the barricades of the coming revolution aborning in Genet’s mobile home.

He was happy to show me a one-meter mirror that had just arrived. Crated up in rough-hewn timber, it sat under a cover in front of his house. Was it homemade? I eagerly inquired. No, he said casually, a company sent it to him. Basically, he had conned the CEO out of it. Genet was going to use it to see if he could put together a portable system that would fit into his Jeep. Granted, portability was part of the goal, but that part didn’t sound too innovationy. No Discovery Channel special here. It was time, I thought, to move on to some of the elements of the telescope and figure out where the great leaps forward were going to take place.

Modern telescopes may still be fairly DIYable, but they are a lot more complicated than the mere lagniappe Galileo invented. The traditional parts that allow you to see—the mirror, the casing, the eyepiece—are still the primary pieces. But today, if you are going to track a star across the sky, you will need a camera, a motor to slowly move it across the sky at night, an encoder that gives the telescope the instructions to stay on target, and a frame made out of material sturdy enough to take a good gust of wind. The slightest shift down here on earth, of course, produces light-years of error out there in the cosmos.