feels worse.Yes, the photographic technology was old and clunky, but clearly the 48-inch Schmidt was one of the best telescopes in the world, at least for imaging wide areas of the sky.
Wide areas of the sky! This was just what I needed! The study of the Kuiper belt, still in its youth, was hampered by the fact that astronomers had been searching for objects in the Kuiper belt with digital cameras that covered only small areas of the sky at once. They were successfully finding objects, but the objects were all small and faint. Imagine being interested in exploring the inhabitants of the ocean but all you have is a small handheld net. If you dip your net in the sea many times, you will certainly find a vast collection of microbes and krill, but you will never know that there are dolphins and sharks and even the occasional whale. In contrast, the photographic plates from the 48-inch Schmidt were not nearly as sensitive as the digital cameras that other astronomers had used—the net was so large that the krill and the microbes would fall right through—but we had a net big enough that we could cover the whole ocean. The big fish would have nowhere to hide.
I thought about the biggest fish.
I had already been thinking by this time that Pluto might not be a solitary planet out there in the Kuiper belt; there might be others still to be found. And using the Schmidt was clearly the way to find them. There was a major problem, though. The last time I had touched real film was when I was in third grade and my father and I had built a little darkroom and developed our pictures from the pinhole cameras we made. There was no way I could carry off this project. I gingerly inquired as to what Jean was doing next fall, when the telescope was to be idle. She didn’t know. She and her coworker would presumably be assigned other tasks around the observatory during that nonworking season. And what if someone else was interested in using the telescope?I asked. Her face lit up as she quickly exclaimed, “I’m sure everyone would be thrilled—we would love to have new projects on the telescope.”
Then she asked: “Do you think we might find a planet?”
• • •
And so I came to be looking for planets. A year later I got to know Jean and her coworker Kevin Rykoski extremely well, as every night, except for bright time, when my nemesis interfered, I called in to talk about what section of the sky to photograph that night. Every night, in all possible permutations, we discussed the position and phase of the moon, the possibility of clouds or fog, and the success or failure of the pictures from the night before. Everywhere I went I carried my hardbound notebook containing maps and calendars and records of everything that we had done to date. Every night, no matter what time zone I was in or continent I was on, I called in to the 48-inch Schmidt precisely thirty minutes before the sun set (the time of which was recorded for every night in my black notebook). I remember making the call from a pay phone on a busy evening street in Berkeley, early in the morning from a hotel in northern Italy, well past dark from my mother’s house in Alabama, but most of all from that little cabin in the woods.
I had meticulously worked out the procedure. Every month we would cover fifteen separate fields, or an area that covered a little over 1 percent of the full sky. While that doesn’t sound like much, in just a single month we were going to have covered more sky than all other astronomers searching for Kuiper belt objects had covered in the preceding five years. On a typical night, we would try to cover three or four fields. To do so, Kevin or Jean would walk from the dimly lit control room crammed with computer equipment and go up a winding set of stairs tothe floor of the telescope dome. Once inside, all of the lights would be put out as they would unpack one of the photographic plates from where it had been stored in a light-tight
Wide areas of the sky! This was just what I needed! The study of the Kuiper belt, still in its youth, was hampered by the fact that astronomers had been searching for objects in the Kuiper belt with digital cameras that covered only small areas of the sky at once. They were successfully finding objects, but the objects were all small and faint. Imagine being interested in exploring the inhabitants of the ocean but all you have is a small handheld net. If you dip your net in the sea many times, you will certainly find a vast collection of microbes and krill, but you will never know that there are dolphins and sharks and even the occasional whale. In contrast, the photographic plates from the 48-inch Schmidt were not nearly as sensitive as the digital cameras that other astronomers had used—the net was so large that the krill and the microbes would fall right through—but we had a net big enough that we could cover the whole ocean. The big fish would have nowhere to hide.
I thought about the biggest fish.
I had already been thinking by this time that Pluto might not be a solitary planet out there in the Kuiper belt; there might be others still to be found. And using the Schmidt was clearly the way to find them. There was a major problem, though. The last time I had touched real film was when I was in third grade and my father and I had built a little darkroom and developed our pictures from the pinhole cameras we made. There was no way I could carry off this project. I gingerly inquired as to what Jean was doing next fall, when the telescope was to be idle. She didn’t know. She and her coworker would presumably be assigned other tasks around the observatory during that nonworking season. And what if someone else was interested in using the telescope?I asked. Her face lit up as she quickly exclaimed, “I’m sure everyone would be thrilled—we would love to have new projects on the telescope.”
Then she asked: “Do you think we might find a planet?”
• • •
And so I came to be looking for planets. A year later I got to know Jean and her coworker Kevin Rykoski extremely well, as every night, except for bright time, when my nemesis interfered, I called in to talk about what section of the sky to photograph that night. Every night, in all possible permutations, we discussed the position and phase of the moon, the possibility of clouds or fog, and the success or failure of the pictures from the night before. Everywhere I went I carried my hardbound notebook containing maps and calendars and records of everything that we had done to date. Every night, no matter what time zone I was in or continent I was on, I called in to the 48-inch Schmidt precisely thirty minutes before the sun set (the time of which was recorded for every night in my black notebook). I remember making the call from a pay phone on a busy evening street in Berkeley, early in the morning from a hotel in northern Italy, well past dark from my mother’s house in Alabama, but most of all from that little cabin in the woods.
I had meticulously worked out the procedure. Every month we would cover fifteen separate fields, or an area that covered a little over 1 percent of the full sky. While that doesn’t sound like much, in just a single month we were going to have covered more sky than all other astronomers searching for Kuiper belt objects had covered in the preceding five years. On a typical night, we would try to cover three or four fields. To do so, Kevin or Jean would walk from the dimly lit control room crammed with computer equipment and go up a winding set of stairs tothe floor of the telescope dome. Once inside, all of the lights would be put out as they would unpack one of the photographic plates from where it had been stored in a light-tight
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