How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [17]
For decades, astronomers carried these Polaroids with them to telescopes all around the world. When you commanded your large telescope to point to the spot in space in which you were interested and you looked at the TV screen, you were usually greeted by a fairly unremarkable field of stars. The Polaroid pictures were the only way to know that the unremarkable field you were looking at was the one in which you could find the galaxy or the nebula or the neutron star you were looking for. In the control room of any telescope at any night of the year, you could find an astronomer or a group of astronomers holding a Polaroid print and staring at the TV screen. Often the actual image of the sky from the telescope was flipped or upside down and no one could ever remember which particular way this combination of instrument and telescope flipped images, so there would always be a time in the night when three or four astronomers would be squinting at a little screen full of stars, holding a little Polaroid picture full of stars, and turning the picture sideways and upside down until someone exclaimed, “Ah ha! This star is here, and that little triangle of stars is here and we’re in just the right place.” These days the technique is mostly simpler—the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey pictures are all quickly available over the Internet, and the cabinets full of prints are gathering dust; but because you can’t take the computer screen and turn it sideways or flip it over, the little group of three or four astronomers is now more often than not standing with their heads cocked in all possible combinations of directions until the lucky one exclaims, “Ah ha!” and then all heads immediately tilt to that direction.
Though the 48-inch Palomar Schmidt was famous to astronomers the world over, I had not even considered it worthy of thought, for one good reason: The telescope still used relatively primitive photographic technology to take pictures. Astronomers a generation before me all learned photographic astronomy: how to load film in the dark, how to ride in a tiny cage suspended at the top of the telescope, how to carefully move the telescope through the sky, how to develop and print. My generation was the first entirely digital generation of astronomers. All telescopes today have digital cameras that use, in only slightly fancier form, the same technology used in everyone’s handheld digital cameras around the world. The change in astronomy is as dramatic as it has been in photography. The ease and speed with which images can be obtained and examined and manipulated and shared has transformed the way that astronomy is done today. So when I overlooked the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope, it was mostly because I considered it a relic from the days of prehistoric astronomy.
But on that snowy, foggy Thanksgiving night at Palomar, I decided that visiting this relic to see how ancient astronomy used to be performed would be an entertaining way to spend a few of the nighttime hours. After making sure I knew exactly which way to go, I walked down the dark, snowy road through the piney woods, past the largest telescope, down a road I had never taken, to where the 48-inch Schmidt resided. Someone was inside, tidying up in the cramped control room that sat underneath the telescope. I introduced myself and met Jean Mueller. She was tidying, in