How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown Read Free Book Online

were no occasional clouds or potential bad weather: There was total cloud cover and continuous bad weather. The forecast was bleak. Astronomy is not always about bad weather at telescopes, but when you are young and eager for discovery or even just a few small steps, the nights of bad weather are the ones that seem to stick most in the mind.
    The fog settled in thickly around the mountain as I arrived atthe top and drove to the ornate old two-story heavy stucco dining and sleeping area known as the Monastery (which was an appropriate image for the earlier days of astronomy, when women were not allowed to stay). I went to the telescope to set up the instruments for the night of work; I spent hours in the windowless dome testing and calibrating and double-checking all of the settings I was going to use. As I finally stepped outside to walk to dinner, a light snow began to fall. After dinner the snow stopped, but a dense fog remained for the night. I stayed awake the whole time, hoping that somehow the fog would lift and I could start working. But it never did. I finally left the telescope to head back to the Monastery as the sun was rising and turning the fog from thick and black to thick and vaguely gray. At the Monastery, I closed the blackout curtains in my tiny room and slept until 2:00 p.m.
    Opening the blackout curtains, I was greeted with more fog and now a heavy covering of wet snow. I was informed that the snow meant that there was no chance the telescope would be working that night; the dome enclosing it was frozen shut and would require direct sunlight to get unstuck. The snow also meant that the roads up and down the mountain were impassable in my two-wheel-drive truck. Instead of a quick meal before sunset with the other astronomers so that we could all run to our different telescopes when darkness arrived, we were all stuck at the Monastery for Thanksgiving. There was no television and no Internet connection, so after dinner, the other astronomers and I built a fire and caught up on our scientific reading. I was still scouring everything I could find to help me come up with ideas of what I might do. Every time I had a thought, I would ask the others around the fireplace questions about the local telescopes and how I could use them to help with this problem or that.
    “How well does the infrared camera at the Hale Telescopework?” Very well, was the answer. A general conversation would follow. We would all drift back to our reading.
    “Is there a long-slit mode for the echelle spectrograph?” I would pipe out. No, was the answer, but we all speculated about how a quick modification would make one possible.
    “Does anyone know anything about the new thermal imager that is coming next year?” Yes, indeed.
    During the course of the evening, I covered, I thought, every combination of telescope and camera and spectrograph and instrument that was available at Palomar.
    Eventually one of the other astronomers asked: “Have you ever thought about the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope?”
    No. I hadn’t. In fact, I only vaguely knew where it was. Down one of those side roads I never drove down? That little dome over by the water tower, maybe?
    I did know, though, that when astronomers were building the huge 200-inch Hale Telescope more than fifty years ago, they realized that having the biggest telescope in the world didn’t do you much good if you didn’t know where to point it (a dilemma with which I am quite familiar). They decided that they needed to make a detailed atlas of the entire sky—a road map for the big telescope. So they built a smaller telescope, then known simply as the 48-inch Schmidt (after the size of the mirror and the general type of telescope), just down the road. The 48-inch Schmidt took pictures of the sky night after night until finally—for the first time in history—every patch had been photographed. The resulting maps of the skies—the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey—are famous throughout