First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (23 page)

First he had to load the camera. Working by feel in total darkness, he lifted up the camera’s lid. He clamped a tiny glass plate into the camera. He snapped down the lid. The night assistant slewed the telescope to Virgo and centered it on the star field that contained the shred of gas, 3C 273. Maarten put his eye to an eyepiece and looked down onto the looking glass, fifty-five feet below, where he saw mists of stars, like pollen on a fish pond. He looked around. He recognized the group of stars that held the radio streak. He could not see the radio streak with his naked eye, but there was, however, a very bright star sitting next to where the radio streak ought to be. He decided to take a spectrum of the star, just to get
that out of the way. Pushing buttons on a paddle, he tweaked the Hale Telescope until the light of the star came through the slit of the spectrograph. He pulled a dark slide shutter, and the exposure began.

Next, looking through another eyepiece, he selected a guide star—a bright star located somewhere in his field of view—and placed a set of crosshairs on it. Whenever the Big Eye drifted, he would see his guide star drift, and he would touch buttons on the paddle to nudge the telescope until the crosshairs met again on the guide star. He kept his 1950 model Eveready flashlight in his pocket for emergencies. Prime focus had a padded tractor seat. He kept still on the tractor seat, occasionally glancing up at the sky to note the constellations turning around the North Pole. “You really have the temptation to just stare at the sky,” he recalled. “One could imagine space travel is like that.” Up in prime focus, it seemed that all he needed from life was a tall ship and a star to steer it by. He wore an electrically heated flight suit, from the Army Air Corps. Prime focus had an intercom speaker that flung Bach cantatas at the stars.

Soon after first light on the Hale, a Palomar gadgeteer by the name of William (“Billy”) Baum had sent away in the mail for a huge pile of war-surplus electrical hot suits. The price: one dollar each. Pretty soon just about every astronomer in the United States had to have an electrically heated flight suit. The next time the observatory ordered a batch of hot suits, the price had risen 25 percent—gougers were already charging $1.25 apiece for them. An electrical suit could help neutralize the cold, but it did nothing for the curse of prime focus—the agony of the bladder. Schmidt usually took a break around midnight, but some astronomers did not. When you have been waiting for perhaps a year to get a few nights on the Big Eye, every minute on the telescope can seem valuable; much too valuable for the astronomer to spare a trip downstairs to urinate. This had led to bizarre practices. During recent years some of the electronic cameras in prime focus needed to be cooled with shaved dry ice. The astronomers would carry their dry ice up in a thermos bottle. Several times during the night they would pour ice chips into the camera, to keep the camera cold. Eventually the thermos bottle would be emptied of its chips,
and the astronomer would then urinate into the bottle and tighten the cap. It is said that on at least one occasion a groggy astronomer had forgotten what he had done, and thinking his thermos contained ice chips, had poured a steaming thermosful of urine into an expensive scientific instrument at prime focus.

The electrical hot suits deliver one kilowatt of heat at full power, and they are still in use on Palomar Mountain, festooned with duct tape and loose wires, although some of the younger astronomers consider those suits to be nothing more than execution shrouds. What if—heaven forbid—the curse of prime focus overwhelmed you and you pissed inside an electrical hot suit? You could be electrocuted, with a great sizzle and in a cloud of boiling urine. “You could burst into flames in prime focus,” Don Schneider remarked, “and you know, in space no one can hear you scream.”

Rudolph Minkowski had all kinds of problems in prime focus. His electrical suit was too tight. He almost suffocated trying to put it on, until his wife finally opened it up and sewed a gusset into the paunch. Minkowski also had trouble learning how to use the telescope. Byron Hill, who had supervised construction of the telescope, showed Minkowski all the buttons on the control paddles in prime focus, and then Hill spent the night at the night assistant’s control desk (which in those days stood at the foot of the telescope) in order to help Minkowski, in case Minkowski needed help. All evening Hill would hear bangs and groans coming over the intercom. The telescope would keep swaying back and forth.

“Do you need any help?”

“I’m fine,” Minkowski growled.

Toward morning, on one occasion, Byron Hill got fed up. The telescope was jerking all over the place. “What in the hell are you doing? Get your elbow off the paddle!” he shouted.

“What of it? I’m doing it on purpose,” Minkowski said.

During the next year Minkowski’s problems in prime focus deepened. The night assistants could hear him talking to himself, wheezing, grunting. He made a sound like a bear—“Uuuunnh!” The night assistants thought these sounds were so interesting that they made a tape recording of them and passed it around. Byron Hill finally figured out what was going on. The seat in prime focus was a hard wooden platter about half the size of Minkowski’s ass. “That
little seat nearly killed Minkowski,” Hill recalled. “I couldn’t stand to think of the agony up there.” One day Hill drove down the mountain to a dealer of farm machinery and paid cash for a tractor seat. Hill said, “I went to a lot of trouble altering that seat to fit Minkowski. I built it up with padding. Then the rat went and took off forty pounds.”

An astronomer at prime focus, sitting in the prime focus cage at the top of the Hale Telescope and staring into the great mirror at light coming out of the deep universe, as imagined by Russell W. Porter in 1940. The astronomer is wearing a tailored and pressed suit, with a pocket handkerchief and wing-tip shoes, and his hair is slicked back with some kind of pomade, maybe Wildroot Cream oil. Such a perfectly dressed astronomer is a purely theoretical being, and has never once worked at the Hale’s prime focus, a place known for bitter cold, long nights, pure ecstasy as the Big Eye swings through the stars—and the agony of the bladder, (Photograph courtesy of Palomar/Caltech)

Smoking was strictly forbidden in prime focus, but prime focus reeked of cigarettes whenever Minkowski had been up there, although the astronomers could not figure out what he was doing with the butts. The night assistants knew. They said that Minkowski was tossing his butts out of the prime focus cage, where they often fell fifty feet down through the telescope and landed on the mirror. The mirror was a perfect ashtray, because when the telescope moved, any cigarette butts lying on the mirror would just roll into a gutter around the edge of the mirror and out of sight. The night assistants claimed that they had taken fistfuls of butts from around the mirror, which made Walter Baade’s hands shake just to think of it. Baade lectured Minkowski about the effects of ashes on Pyrex glass, to no avail. The Prime Focus Spectrograph was a frail scientific instrument, studded with knobs that tormented Minkowski. When he could not get a knob to turn the way he thought it should, he would give it what was called the Minkowski Treatment. First he would wrap a fist around the knob and really twist it. If the knob still refused to turn, Minkowski would utter one or two obscene remarks in German, throw his cigarette overboard, and produce a little pair of pliers from his pocket and absolutely destroy the knob. On one occasion Minkowski could not get the camera on the spectrograph to open up so that he could change photographic plates. The problem was a pair of wing nuts. The wing nuts would not loosen up, even when he worked at them with the pliers. He did not realize that he was turning them the wrong way, and was actually tightening them. The next day the engineering crew found that Minkowski had frozen the wing nuts, and they had to cut them off. They replaced them with clamps having knurled thumb grips, in order to encourage Minkowski to keep his pliers to himself, but, as Byron Hill said, “You could make the telescope astronomer-proof, but you could forget about making it Minkowski-proof.” Nevertheless, once Minkowski had gotten settled on the tractor
seat with a cigarette and had gotten the colors of a radio galaxy streaming through the diamond dealer’s watch fob, Minkowski went into a kind of hibernation. His grunts mellowed into sighs, the Hale Telescope leaned over into the night, and Minkowski and the sky became one. Minkowski is one of the few members of the human species to have a galaxy named for him. Minkowski’s Object, a very peculiar galaxy, sits in the constellation Cetus, the Whale.

On the night of December 27, 1962, Maarten Schmidt took a two-hour exposure of a bright star that lay next to the little radio streak known as 3C 273. He finished the exposure just before dawn. Breaking apart the camera, he slipped the tiny exposed plate into a lightproof box. He worked quickly, because during the moments when the plate was in the open air, a meteor could flash overhead, exposing the plate and ruining it. The next afternoon he developed his bits of glass in the darkroom. When they had dried, he studied them through a magnifying glass like a jeweler’s loupe, while jotting notes on the yellow graph paper that he used for recording his thoughts: “Dec. 27. 3C 273. This is the bright star at the end of the streak. Everything is strongly overexposed.”

The star had practically roasted his plate. He noticed that the star was emitting strange colors. It was one of those radio stars: “There is a broad emission line at 3,250 [angstroms, a common measure of wavelength] … Also some fine regularly spaced emission lines around 3,400.… There must be much more, we need a lighter exposure.”

The human mind forever wants to see tiger stripes in the forest. As it would turn out, there were no regular lines in that particular exposure. The plate was grossly overexposed.

Two nights later, on December 29, having been busy with radio galaxies, Schmidt got around to taking another spectrum of the radio star. Looking at it through the eyepiece and tweaking the Hale Telescope, he watched the star move onto the slit. He was really quite surprised at how bright this star was, at least by the standards of the Big Eye. He was used to looking at faint galaxies—galaxies that he could barely see when he stared down on them in the mirror. “You were always worrying as to whether you were
seeing ghosts,” he would remember. “You spent a long time staring at the field while you were setting the telescope on the object. You had to use averted vision—look away to one side, and then you’d see the object, or maybe you wouldn’t see it. One time I spent four and a half hours taking a spectrum of a galaxy. When I developed it, I had an absolutely blank plate. I had totally imagined that galaxy.” This 3C 273 was no ghost. “It was outstandingly bright,” he recalled. “I could just barely see color in it. Optically it looked rather blue.” The following afternoon he saw that he had made a good exposure of it—he saw all kinds of emission lines. He decided that the faint streak next to the star must be some kind of a jet emerging from the star.

He returned to Palomar Mountain at the end of January to work on more radio galaxies. He also tried to take more spectra of 3C 273. On the first night he overexposed another plate. He could not get used to photographing these bright stars. The following night he shot the star in a very brief exposure, and then he wore out the night trying to soak up a spectrum from the fine jet that protruded from the star. At break of day, feeling wobbly and eerie and happy, as he always did after working hard on the sky, Maarten reluctantly turned away from the eyepiece and returned to earth, holding, in his lightproof box, a few bits of glass containing what he believed were images of starlight. When he developed the plates, he saw that the long exposure of the jet had produced absolutely nothing: “Jet—needs further looking into.”

He went back to Pasadena. He had taken several plates of 3C 273 by now. The spectrum showed six emission lines. As usual, the lines did not correspond to any known form of matter. He described the lines to colleagues, and nobody could explain them. Meanwhile the British journal
Nature
wanted to publish some articles on these peculiar radio stars. Maarten agreed to write an article.