• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 443 0

a hawk in measuring how the celestial light entering his spectroscope was separated into its component wavelengths, with each spectral line offering enticing clues. He was America's leading practitioner of this new technique, with some of his best work being done on measuring the speeds of nebulae within the Milky Way. In Latin, nebulae is the word for “clouds” or “mist,” exactly what these extended objects look like through a telescope. Some are roundish and were dubbed “planetary nebulae” in the eighteenth century by British astronomer William Herschel, who thought they resembled planets through his telescope. Today, astronomers know that such circular nebulae are the result of aging stars casting off their outer envelopes. Other nebulae, such as the renowned Orion nebula, are more irregular and diffuse, made luminous by the new stars being born within these great cosmic oceans of gas.

By the late 1880s, as Keeler entered his thirties and continued these celestial explorations, he faced a career crisis. He was eager to marry Cora Matthews, the niece of Richard Floyd, the superviser of the observatory's construction and president of the Lick Trust. The couple had first met on the mountain but could not tie the knot right away because Lick officials would not provide them adequate housing at the observatory once married. There was also Keeler's growing dissatisfaction with director Holden, a tyrannical and humorless man who often tried to share credit for some of Keeler's discoveries and at times ordered the young man to carry out observations he was not eager to do. It was said that Holden, given his West Point background, ran the observatory “as though it were a fort in hostile territory,” barking out commands like a general under seige. On top of that, there was the tiresome isolation atop the mountain, with few opportunities to escape to the city and engage in a fuller social life. “I am a human being first and an astronomer afterwards,” Keeler confessed to a friend.

Faced with these growing concerns, Keeler began networking among his astronomer contacts and in 1891 secured the directorship of the Allegheny Observatory, a return to his first place of employment. His old boss Langley had by then moved to Washington, D.C., where he served as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and was beginning work on his lifelong dream to successfully launch a flying machine.

In terms of telescope power, Keeler's transfer to the Allegheny Observatory, situated on a hill across the river just north of America's steel capital, was a giant leap backward. The weather was poorer, the air was tainted with Pittsburgh's industrial smoke, the atmosphere was more turbulent for viewing, and the observatory's main telescope was a 13-inch refractor, far smaller than Lick's 36-incher. Yet, in some ways it was a blessing. The constraints forced him to focus his astrophysical studies on such objects as nebulae, a less trendy territory and hence riper for discovery. Because of their larger size, compared to stars, the fuzzy objects could still be adequately examined, even with a smaller scope. Moreover, astronomical photography had become more efficient and convenient, allowing him to build up exposures and see spectral details he could not see before with his eye alone. He doggedly tracked down every new advance in spectroscopic and photographic equipment in hope of offsetting Lick Observatory's advantages. The experience, though exhausting, only enhanced his astronomical abilities.

From his new post in Pennsylvania Keeler eventually made headlines worldwide. He had been using his spectroscope at Allegheny to measure how fast some of the major planets, such as Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, were rotating. Based on a method already used to gauge the Sun's rotation, Keeler knew that a spectral line in light arriving from the edge of the planet rotating toward us would be shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum; this same line would shift equally the other way, toward the red, when emanating from the edge, or “limb,” of the planet moving away.