The Perfect Machine (78 page)

The history and lore of the telescope are never far away, but when the telescope has slewed to position on the coordinates of a tiny region of the heavens, and distant objects begin to snap into focus on the video displays in the data room, all else seems to disappear. The voyage has begun.

It takes a few moments to match the gray dots and blobs on the video display to the myriad objects on the Palomar Sky Survey plates, from the forty-eight-inch Schmidt camera, that observers frequently use to identify their targets. For a moment it is difficult to match the image on the video display with the plate, then suddenly the tiny bite of sky that the two-hundred has brought into the data room fits perfectly. With the buttons on a handheld paddle, the observer moves the telescope incrementally, placing a remote object—a galaxy or quasar billions of light-years away—on the slit of the spectrograph. A few keys punched into a computer keyboard and the sensitive CCD detector goes to work, sucking up photons launched across the heavens billions of years ago. From the warmth of the data room it seems almost too easy. After ten or twenty minutes, the computer can present a quick sampling of the data, enough for the astronomer to know if he needs another try to get what he wanted.

The apparent ease of the operation is deceptive. The sample of data on the video display is a fragment of the data the detector has gathered. In the few minutes of each exposure, the CCD integrates tens, even hundreds, of megabytes of data. The real findings will wait until the information accumulated on the computer disks at Palomar is brought back on tape for reduction and image analysis on big number-crunching computers. Observers leaving the mountain carry their tapes by hand.

Often the observer will take two spectra, favoring the blue and red ends of the spectrum. Imaging is often done with several exposures, like a photographer bracketing his shutter speeds to make sure he gets a usable photo. Then the night assistant gets a new set of coordinates, and the telescope moves on, seeking another object, another point of data. As huge as the telescope seems, as voluminous as the data from an evening’s work, a mirror two hundred inches in diameter is a tiny window on the universe. Forty years of observing is a blink in the eons of time. The astronomer and astrophysicist are forever condemned to bring order and understanding out of a paucity of data, momentary glimpses of the depths of the universe.

Night after night, whenever the weather is clear enough, the research on the big telescope goes on, too important to be stopped by war or politics. In the late 1970s, after the Carnegie Institution poured money and energy into a new observatory at Las Campanas, in Chile,
old rivalries and tensions came to a boil at Mount Wilson and Palomar, Santa Barbara Street and California Street. Finally, in 1979, Maarten Schmidt, then director of the joint observatories, presided over a divorce. Caltech kept Palomar and the Big Bear Solar Observatory. The Carnegie Institution kept Mount Wilson and Las Campanas. The Telescope Allocation Committee survived the split for a decade; until 1990 the telescopes of Mount Wilson, Palomar, and Las Campanas were all listed on the pink sheets that announce who gets observing time on the telescopes. But it was an ugly divorce. Friendships among astronomers were rent; some would never be repaired. Allan Sandage, who had been one of the most expert and productive observers on the two-hundred-inch telescope, refused to set foot on the mountain again.

As the Carnegie Institution shifted its attention to the new telescopes at Las Campanas, it announced that it could no longer afford to operate the instruments at Mount Wilson. The one-hundred-inch telescope was mothballed. On its last night of operation, in 1985, night assistants and old friends of the telescope gathered to read portions of the poem Noyes had written to celebrate first light, sixty-eight years before. An effort to reopen the telescope under the operation of a foundation foundered. A second effort has been successful, and the new Mount Wilson Institute will soon bring the one-hundred-inch Hooker telescope into full operation.

The maintenance costs of the Palomar Observatory, and the cost of new instruments, are daunting. Bequests help. A generous bequest gave a name to the forty-eight-inch Schmidt telescope, now known as the Oschin telescope, and paid for a new corrector plate, sensitive into the infrared. Recently, a portion of the time on the two-hundred-inch telescope has been allocated to astronomers from Cornell University and the Carnegie Institution (which will drop out of the program at the end of 1994), in return for contributions to the upkeep and instrumentation of the telescope.

Sixty-six years after George Hale began the project in 1928, the two-hundred-inch telescope keeps working. Bigger instruments have taken the place it long held as the largest working telescope, but the two-hundred remains a premier research instrument. In 1991, more than forty years after the telescope entered service, Jim Gunn and Maarten Schmidt measured a red shift of 4.9 on an object they discovered with the two-hundred-inch telescope, making it the fastest and most distant object ever observed.

That discovery, like so many others, found its way to the science reporters. For a brief moment the name “Palomar” and the machine that had so many times captivated a nation was once again in the news. For men and women old enough to remember the journey of the disk across the country or the move of the mirror to the mountaintop, or for another generation that had read and heard the stories of the
technological wonder, the name was a reminder of an earlier era, a time when American engineers, scientists, and workmen dared to build a machine that would challenge the mysteries of the universe.

In the early morning, as dawn comes to the mountain and the sky grows too light to continue, the night assistant closes the diaphragm over the mirror and the shutters in the dome. The pumps are suddenly quiet as the telescope shuts down. The observers, eager for the quiet sanctuary of the Monastery after a long night in the data room, leave by the inconspicuous door on the side of the dome to walk or drive back to the Monastery. Most cannot resist a glance back at the great dome and a quiet smile of gratitude for the privilege of a night voyaging into the unknown.

Notes on Sources

Much of this book is based on archival material and interviews. In the notes that follow, I have used the following abbreviations for archival citations:

I have also drawn on papers and documents provided by Ben Traxler, Byron Hill, Mel Johnson, Allan Sandage, Rein Kroon, Olin Wilson, Robert Thicksten, Sylvia Marshall, and the Astrophysics Library at Caltech. My notes, the material given to me by participants, copies of audio- and videocassettes, and the photocopied material from various archives that I used for this book will eventually be donated to the
Astrophysics Library of the California Institute of Technology for the use of future researchers.

1. April 1921

Eddington on Einstein: “Forty Years of Astronomy,”
Background to Modern Science
(Cambridge University Press, 1938), pp. 140–42. The quote on Chinese astronomers is from Joseph Needham,
Science and Civilisation in China,
vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 1959). The physicist before Congress is quoted in D. Kevles,
The Physicists
(Vintage, 1979), p. 96. Carnegie is quoted in Helen Wright,
Explorer of the Universe: A Biography of George Ellery Hale
(Dutton, 1966), p. 309.

Shapley describes the train ride in
Through Rugged Ways to the Stars
(Scribner’s, 1969).

2. Washington

On women “computers,” see Margaret W. Rossiter,
Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 53, and John Lankford and Rickey L. Slavings, “Gender and Science: Women in American Astronomy, 1859–1940,”
Physics Today,
March 1990, p. 60. Owen Gingerich, “Faintness means Farness,”
The Great Copernicus Chase,
(Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 213–24, is a superb essay on the importance of this concept.

On Shapley’s work with Cepheids: Owen Gingerich and Barbara Welther, “Harlow Shapley and the Cepheids,”
The Great Copernicus Chase,
pp. 238–45. The actual remarks at the symposium were not transcribed. Later, the two participants exchanged, polished, and published their papers in
Bulletin of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences 2
(1921), pp. 171–217. The basic positions they took did not change in the revisions. Portions of the symposium are quoted in Kenneth R. Lang and Owen Gingerich,
A Source Book in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1900–1975
(Harvard University Press, 1979).

Shapley on van Maanen is quoted in Richard Berendzen, Richard Hart, and Daniel Seeley,
Man Discovers the Galaxies
(Science History Publications, 1976), p. 116. Hale on Shapley is quoted in Wright,
Explorer of the Universe,
pp. 325–26.

3. The Worrier

Hale wrote a brief memoir of his youth,
Some Personal Recollections
[undated], CIT/Hale 92. The London trip is described in Burton Holmes, “Boyhood Memories of George Ellery Hale,”
The Griffith Observer
9:9 (September 1947), p. 106. On Hale’s MIT years, see Edward C. Pickering to George E. Hale, 27 February 1888, CIT/Hale 33.

On Lick: Helen Wright,
James Lick’s Monument
(Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 8; M. W. Shinn, “The Lick Observatory”
Overland Monthly,
1892, p. 2, cited in Henry C. King,
The History of the Telescope
(Dover, 1955). Lick’s will is quoted in “An Extract from the Will of James Lick” in Harlow Shapley, ed.,
A Source Book in Astronomy
(McGraw-Hill, 1929), pp. 316–17.

The report on the proposed Southern California answer to the Lick telescope is in
Scientific American,
October 1990, p. 16. On the Crossley telescope, see George Hale,
The Study of Stellar Evolution
(University of Chicago Press, 1908), p. 45.

On Root and the Carnegie Institution: Philip C. Jessup,
Elihu Root
(Dodd,
Mead, 1938), vol. 2, p. 489. Carnegie commented on Lick in
The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays
(Doubleday, 1933).

Hussey’s report on Palomar: “Report by W. J. Hussey on Certain Possible Sites for Astronomical Work in California and Arizona,”
Appendix A to Report of Committee on Observatories,
Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1903, IEB 1–22–322. Also, George E. Hale, “Observatory of the California Institute,”
Astrophysical Journal
82 (September 1935), p. 125.

Ritchey: Donald E. Osterbrock,
Pauper & Prince: Ritchey, Hale, & Big American Telescopes
(Tucson, 1993). On the precautions for grinding the sixty-inch mirror: George W. Ritchey, “The Two-Foot Reflecting Telescope of the Yerkes Observatory,”
Astrophysical Journal
14 (1901), pp. 218–20; Dinsmore Alter, and Clarence H. Cleminshaw,
Palomar Observatory
(Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles, n.d.), p. 5. The original grinding machine has been restored.

4. The Whirllgus

On Hooker and the one-hundred-inch telescope: George Ellery Hale,
Signals from the Stars
(London: Scribner’s, 1932), p. 16. There is a collection of photographs of the Hooker home at the Huntington Museum in San Marino, California. Also, A. H. Joy,
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
39 (1927), p. 14.

On the American phenomenon of nervous exhaustion: Tom Lutz,
American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History
(Cornell University Press, 1991). Ptsosis: Osterbrock,
Pauper & Prince,
p. 128.

The decision to go back to the original one-hundred-inch disk:
Mt. Wilson Observatory Yearbook
8 (1909), p. 179; Carnegie to Hale, 27 November 1931. Quoted in Helen Wright, Joan N. Warnow, and Charles Weiner,
The Legacy of George Ellery Hale
(MIT Press, 1972), p. 63.