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By Root 199 0

for him. He had to look at each pair of photographic plates by eye and slowly search for anything that looked as though it moved from one night to the next. This was the job that I had calculated would have taken me forty years to accomplish, yet Kowal had done it all in something like a decade and in his spare time. I was banking on the fact that the only way Kowal could have looked at so much sky was if he went very quickly and paid attention to only the brightest objects on his photos. The fainter objects might actually be on his photos, but they would have slipped through his net. Many of my fellow astronomers weren’t convinced by this argument and thought instead that I was off on a wishful-thinking fantasy chase. Chad’s discovery of Object X made it clear that they were wrong in principle, and we now had a chance to see if they were wrong in practice. From published records, we found that Kowal had pointed the telescope directly at the predicted position of Object X on the nights of May 17 and 18, 1983. If we could find Object X in those pictures, we would have a twenty-year-old position for Object X, and we would then know its full orbit exquisitely.

Kowal’s photographic plates—and all of the other plates from fifty years of historic photographic work at Palomar Observatory—should have been stored in the airtight humidity-controlled halon-protected vault in the basement of the astronomy building next door to me on the Caltech campus. I went down to the vault, opened the lock, and peered inside, not sure exactly how I was going to find the specific photographic plates I needed among the thousands that were in there. The vault was in general disarray—no one had really used the photographic plates for a long while—but after letting my eyes adapt to the dim lights I could see that the place was laid out like library stacks, with the photographic plates in large manila envelopes arranged like books on the shelves, but by date rather than by author. I excitedly walked down the rows until I found 1983, and then I ducked into the aisle and looked up to where May should be, anxiously wondering what condition the plates would be in. But there were no plates. There was nothing. May of 1983—and several months before and after—were blank spots on the shelves, with little more than years-old dust. If the plates were misfiled, or perhaps had never been filed, the chances of my randomly coming across them in the vast vault were essentially zero.

That night I called Jean Mueller at Palomar. Jean had been involved with the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope for so long that I thought she might remember the Kowal plates and might know if they had ever been stored. She told me that, by chance, she was going to be down in Pasadena the very next day and would be happy to take a look. That day, the two of us went down to the vault, opened the door, and let our eyes adjust.

“I was down here a while ago, and I think I came across them,” she said as she moved down the stacks. She quickly passed 1983.

“That’s where they’re supposed to be,” I pointed out.

She ignored me, kept walking, and four or five rows later, turned left into an aisle between shelves crammed with manila envelopes full of photographic plates. She walked ten feet, turned right, reached up to the second-to-top shelf, pulled down an envelope, and said, “I think they might be around here someplace.”

She wasn’t quite right. She had put her finger on the plates from May 3, 1983—two weeks earlier than I needed. Our plates were about twenty-two inches to the right.

“How are you going to look at them?” Jean asked.

“Um, well, I was just going to look.”

“You won’t see a thing. Here, you’ll want this.” And she led me back to the front, where some decrepit equipment lay in disarray from decades of neglect. She handed me a light box—an ancient wooden tabletop enclosure with a slightly unsafe-looking power cord that, when plugged in, illuminated a photographic plate placed on top of it so that someone could examine it.

“We used to have a blink comparator”—the same sort of device Clyde