The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [11]
A Rather Remarkable Number of Nebulae
Keeler traveled to the Lick Observatory along a road that was a marvel of engineering in its day. Although Mount Hamilton is less than a mile high, the journey from its base to the top is more than twenty miles in length, with the roadway sinuously zigging and zagging as it gradually ascends. There are some 360 switchbacks in all, and some were even given special names, such as “the Tunnel,” “Crocodile Jaw,” and “Oh My Point,” branded by the oft-heard refrain as people sat atop the stagecoach and looked down in horror at the point's steep drop-off. The serpentine route was installed to maintain a gentle gradient, so that stagecoach horses in the nineteenth century never needed to break their stride.
Upon reaching the top, Keeler was immediately enamored of the breathtaking scenery. “The view from the observatory peak is a very beautiful one, particularly in the spring, when the surrounding hills are covered with bright green verdure, and the eye looks down upon acres of wild flowers,” he later wrote in a pamphlet for visitors. “To the west lies the lovely Santa Clara valley, shut in from the ocean by mountains somewhat lower than the Mt. Hamilton range. Sometimes the entire valley is filled with clouds, rolling onward under a clear sky and bright sun like a river of snow… The surrounding mountain tops project out of the fog like black islands.” Often the ocean fog arrives at sunset, rolling in from the Pacific at the Golden Gate, to the north, and Monterey Bay, to the south.
Not everyone on the mountain was enthusiastic about Keeler's arrival. The observatory's superintendent, Thomas Fraser, was initially wary of the newcomer. “If he has the right ring all will be right,” said Fraser, “but if Stubern [sic] then things will go wrong and he will have to leave that is all there is to it.” It didn't take long, though, for Fraser to be won over by the exceptional skill Keeler displayed as the telescope was being prepared for operation.
Its great lenses were finally installed on New Year's Eve 1887, but due to severe weather the staff could not test the telescope out until a few days later. Often in the wintertime, storms would sweep over the mountain with winds gusting more than 60 miles per hour, which would drift the snow about the dwellings more than ten feet high. Once the staff got back to the telescope, the trial run did not go well. To their horror the astronomers discovered that Alvan Clark, the telescope maker, had misstated the instrument's required length. Much like the Hubble Space Telescope's initial mishap a century later, they couldn't get it into focus. The telescope's tube should have extended fifty-six feet, but instead was six inches too long, forcing them to get out their tools and spend valuable days cutting the tube down to size. Clark's son, a partner in the telescope firm, was there for the trial, “a terrible old blow and grumbler,” Keeler told Holden. While Clark insisted that his firm's glass was superb and the eyepieces “triumphs of art,” he declared the dome “worthless.”
With its tube shortened, the telescope was at last tried out on January 7, 1888, a cloudless night that was piercingly cold. With the dome frozen solid that evening, the handful of staff members and guests present could only passively observe the objects that happened to pass by the dome's slit, open toward the southeast. Yet, “no inconvenience was felt beyond the necessity of a little waiting,” recalled Keeler. He was pleased to find the clock running smoothly and the mounting working well. The group first observed Rigel, a blue-white double star, followed by the Orion nebula, its great streamers making it one of the most spellbinding sights through a telescope. “Here the great light-gathering power of the object glass was strikingly apparent,” Keeler noted. Then, just after midnight, Saturn came into view. Keeler reported that the planet was “beyond doubt the greatest telescopic spectacle ever beheld by man. The giant planet, with