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By Root 211 0

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 to the 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 box. From my pinhole camera days I remembered that film was developed in red light, which doesn’t affect it. But these photographic plates were designed to be especially sensitive to red light, as objects in the Kuiper belt tend to be on the red side. All of the work on the plates, then, had to be done with no lights whatsoever. When the plate was unpacked, it would be walked to the telescope and inserted into the base. Only then was the shutter of the telescope opened and the light from the sky allowed to beam onto the plate. Thirty minutes later, someone would again walk to the top of the stairs in the dark, take the plate out of its holder, and then walk to the other side of the dark dome floor and place the plate into a miniature manual elevator and drop it down to the other person who was waiting in the darkroom below. The person on the dome floor would get a new plate and begin looking at a new patch of sky, while the person in the darkroom washed the plate in a succession of developer and fixer fluids until, about the time that the plate was finished, a new plate would appear in the miniature elevator. In the morning, before going to sleep, Jean and Kevin would look at the crop of pictures from the night. Some would be smeared or have defective photographic emulsion and have to be rejected, but the good ones got labeled, put into the cabinet, and filed on my list. The next night we would review what had happened the night before, discuss the weather forecast, curse the encroaching moon, and start over again.