First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    The Hale Telescope as drawn by Russell W. Porter in 1939, before the telescope was finished. Even though he could only imagine it in its finished state, Porter captured the grandeur of the Hale. The telescope’s tube is the open structure of girders. The prime focus cage, where an astronomer can sit and stare directly into the mirror, is at the upper left of the picture, at the top of the telescope. The mirror is at the bottom of the tube, lower right. The curved horseshoe bearing is toward the upper right of the picture, profiled against the night sky, which is apparent through the open dome slit. (Photograph courtesy of Palomar/Caltech)
    4-shooter is Jim Gunn’s favorite toy. It can take four pictures of the sky simultaneously. These pictures can be joined edge to edge to make a four-paneled mosaic. 4-shooter has taken pictures of newborn stars shining through dust cocoons, and of elderly carbon stars coughing bubbles of hydrogen, and of sheets of gas blown from stars that have exploded and died. The camera has made images of dwarf galaxies, of starburst galaxies, and of elliptical galaxies studded with warty globules of stars. It has unveiled the explosive central nuclei of Seyfert galaxies and has looked into their quasarlike cores, filigreed with sable dust. It has taken snapshots of colliding galaxies flinging away threads of stars as they dance and merge with one another. 4-shooter has exposed supergiant cannibal galaxies feeding upon other galaxies for lunch. 4-shooter has imaged rich swarms of galaxies interorbiting like clouds of gnats, and it has mapped gravitational lenses, which are warps in spacetime that break the light of quasars into double, triple, and quadruple mirages from the dawn of time.
    Moving quickly around the cage, Gunn appeared to be a tiny figure fighting a tangle of wires, dwarfed by the immensity of the Hale Telescope. He could not see what he was doing, because he had inherited a set of nearsighted eyes from his father. “I can’t see up close, and I can’t see far away, either,” he would say, explaining that he owned a large collection of Woolworth spectacles of varied magnifying powers that he planted everywhere from Princeton to Caltech to Palomar Mountain in order to have a pair of glasses within reach whenever he needed them, but at the moment he had forgotten to leave a pair of glasses inside the Hale Telescope. He hit a switch.
    “Donz,” he called into an intercom. He was calling for his fellow astronomer Don Schneider.
    “Greetings,” a voice crackled.
    “I need a pair of young eyes,” Gunn said.
    A door in the wall of the dome flew open, and Don Schneider ran onto the dome floor and scrambled up the stairs into the cage. In addition to his blond hair and beard, Don had a narrow face and intense, flickering blue eyes. He pulled a wool cap down nervously over his head and said, “It’s going to be chaos tonight.” He stood well back from Gunn’s tangle of wires.
    “Take it easy,” Gunn said.
    “What a disaster,” Schneider said. “It looks like it’s going to fog up tonight.” He informed Gunn that the computer system had recently gone insane.
    “Yeah,” Gunn said. “That’s not a problem. Tell Barbara to write some lines of code to fix it.” Gunn held out a fistful of wires. “Will you hold this?” he said. The wires trembled; Gunn had developed the shakes from lack of sleep.
    “Have you had something to drink?” Schneider asked, smiling at Gunn’s shakes.
    “Absolutely not. I have been trying for half a fucking hour to solder
three wires
.”
    Their heads bent toward the tangle. They worked fiendishly. Plumes of breath and burning rosin smoked in the cold air. Suddenly a flashbulb went off nearby. Don Schneider glanced around. A group of schoolchildren had arrived, with their teachers, to view the progress of American science. The children stood behind a wall of glass—a viewing gallery for visitors, which runs along one side of the dome.