The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [102]
Hubble got his first crack at the 100-inch telescope, what he called his “magic mirror,” on Christmas Eve. So immense was its light-gathering power that it could spot a candle from five thousand miles away. Hubble couldn't have asked for a more fitting holiday present; the atmosphere was almost at its best at the start of the evening, and it was also dark-sky time, a waxing crescent Moon having just set in the west. That was the prime opportunity to seek out the sky's faintest objects. He first photographed a hazy star near the Pleiades cluster. With a sixty-minute exposure, its nebulosity showed up fairly well. Afterward, he perused two more objects, a wispy planetary nebula and (again) his variable nebula NGC 2261. After Hubble aimed the giant scope at this target, he was able to obtain his best photo of the night. The variable nebula soon became his observational “mascot.”
At the end of his observing runs, if he was particularly eager to see his results, Hubble would go right to the dark room and develop his plates. Once dry, each was entered into his official Observing Book and put away in a numbered envelope. For marking his plates, Hubble used a special code: H 31 H, for example, stood for the hundred-inch telescope, plate number 31, taken by Hubble.
One of Hubble's first tasks on Mount Wilson was working with Frederick Seares to determine the color of “nebulous stars,” stars surrounded by diffuse clouds of luminous matter, such as the ones in the Pleiades. For that project he primarily worked with the 60-inch and got a paper published fairly quickly in the Astrophysical Journal. It was a warm-up session for Hubble's main purpose for being at Mount Wilson. He was going to finish what he started in his doctoral dissertation—figure out exactly what those faint spiral nebulae truly were. As he later told Slipher, he was committed to one issue and one issue only: “to determine the relation of nebulae to the universe.”
Henry Norris Russell was getting nervous about the spirals around this time. There were so many conflicting observations. The novae occasionally discovered within the spiraling clouds suggested they were far-off stellar systems. But then van Maanen was seeing them rotate, at an impossible rate if they were truly distant. “We are on the brink of a big discovery—or maybe a big paradox, until someone gets the right clue,” ventured Russell.
The dawn of the 1920s seemed the right time to break the impasse. With the war over, pent-up energies were fueling a plethora of inventions and clever ideas. Heber Curtis, now settled at the Allegheny Observatory, was particularly enamored of a newfangled entertainment medium. “I have just gone into the lecture room, pressed a button, and heard records by Galli-Curci and Rachmaninoff sent out by wireless telephony from East Pittsburgh, ten or twelve miles away,” he wrote his former Lick boss, Campbell. “As soon as the Westinghouse people start a broadcasting station at San Francisco, the mountain would enjoy one of these receiving and amplifying sets. They send out music, stock market reports, news bulletins, speeches, etc… We have one of their experimental models here on loan (hope they will eventually give it to us). It is called ‘the Aeriola Grand’; is the size of a small phonograph such as you have; is simplicity itself; has only one button and one dial,—no adjustments; about 75 feet of a single wire forms our aerial. Sermons on Sunday, with no collection possible!”
At Mount Wilson Albert A. Michelson and Francis Pease mounted