The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [101]
High in heaven it shone,
Alive with all the thoughts, and hopes, and
dreams
Of man's adventurous mind.
Up there, I knew
The explorers of the sky, the pioneers
Of science, now made ready to attack
That darkness once again, and win new
worlds.
… they hoped to crown the toil
Of twenty years, and turn upon the sky
The noblest weapon ever made by man.
War had delayed them. They had been
drawn away
Designing darker weapons. But no gun
Could outrange this…
We creep to power by inches. Europe
trusts
Her “giant forty” still. Even to-night
Our own old sixty has its work to do;
And now our hundred-inch … I hardly
dare
To think what this new muzzle of ours
may find…
But there were delays in the final preparation of the long and imposing telescopic “muzzle,” keeping it from full operation. “The truth is the war work here has completely stopped work on the 100-inch,” said Shapley to a colleague a year later. “Very little has been done with it… because of the war contracts in the shop.” Ritchey, for example, had to turn his attention to making lenses and prisms for such military items as binoculars, range finders, and periscopes. Once the United States officially entered the war on the side of the Allies, the Mount Wilson optical shop was quickly engaged in the effort.
Observations with the 100-inch did not really get going until the war was over and necessary personnel had finally returned from their military duties. Its first images—of the Moon, of nebulae—surpassed the promises that Hale had made to Hooker years earlier when a telescope of such a tremendous size was only a far-off aspiration. “In such an embarrassment of riches the chief difficulty is to withstand the temptation toward scattering of effort, and to form an observing programme directed toward the solution of crucial problems rather than the accumulation of vast stores of miscellaneous data,” said Hale.
High on Hale's list of priorities was determining once and for all the true size and nature of the universe, a job that Hubble took on with single-minded devotion.
Hubble's first night of observing on the mountain was on October 18, 1919. It took about an hour then to make the journey in a motorcar. Via the single stretch of telephone wire that ran to the top of Mount Wilson, the tollhouse keeper at the bottom alerted the observatory that a car was on its way, as the road was only wide enough for one car. Away from active observing for more than two years due to the war, Hubble initially freshened up his telescopic skills that autumn evening by using a 10-inch refractor called the Cooke lens. Though small, the telescope's wide-angle view enabled him to explore the sky quite handily. He took photos of the North America nebula (a diffuse cloud in the Cygnus constellation) and then directed the telescope to a nebulous loop of gas near the “belt” of Orion. He was getting back his sea legs, perusing familiar celestial territory, and mulling over his observing strategy for the coming months.
Seven days later Hubble tried out the 60-inch telescope. He took a photograph of the nebula NGC 1333, a rich star-forming region in Perseus, and later checked out how his beloved variable nebula, the one he first noticed as a graduate student at Yerkes, was doing. He noted that “striking changes have happened [in it] since 1916,” which was the last time he had taken a look.
Milton Humason, who became Hubble's devoted observing partner a decade later, first met the young astronomer during these opening runs at the observatory. “He was photographing at the Newtonian focus of the 60-inch, standing while he did his guiding,” recalled Humason, many years later. “His tall, vigorous figure, pipe in