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keeping that light from registering on either the eye or a photographic plate. This was a dismaying effect to a spectroscopist, who was devoted to collecting each and every light wave emanating from a celestial object. Mirrors, on the other hand, didn't have this problem. They shepherded all light waves equally, no matter what the color, right to the focus. Moreover, lenses were reaching their maximum size at the end of the nineteenth century; they couldn't be manufactured much bigger than forty inches without getting distorted by their own weight. Mirrors, on the other hand, could be made much larger. In Keeler's estimation, reflecting telescopes had acquired a stigma in the past because they had been placed in cheap, flimsy mounts.

Keeler had seen the power of reflectors firsthand while visiting England in 1896 and attending a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. There Isaac Roberts, a former businessman and accomplished amateur astronomer, displayed the eye-catching photographs taken with his 20-inch reflector. Roberts had pioneered many of the techniques for taking long-term exposures and was the first to reveal that the Andromeda nebula was a spiral. Photography was then having a tremendous impact upon astronomy, radically transforming its procedures. Holden, right before Lick opened, wrote that astronomers can now “hand down to our successors a picture of the sky, locked in a box.” Observers were able to continue their research at their office desks, analyzing their images with mathematical precision, no longer dependent on crude drawings, hasty notes in a logbook, or the fading memory of their night at the telescope. Changes in a celestial object could at last be accurately monitored, from year to year and decade to decade.

After the palace revolt against Lick's former director, the Crossley had been abandoned. It was the mountain's white elephant. No Lick observer was interested in using the reflector, not a surprising turn of events given its dreadful reputation. Even before Holden left, a staff astronomer had written a long memorandum summarizing what sort of research could be done with the Crossley. The title of his paper broadcasted the answer with unforgiving bluntness: “No Work of Importance.”

Keeler thought otherwise, even though he had never before used a reflecting telescope. He was interested because he was after rare game: the particular stars and nebulae that had eluded previous spectroscopists due to their faintness, and the Crossley's special features were going to allow him to obtain a decent spectrum. The Crossley was not just any telescope mirror; it was the largest of its kind in America, but Keeler faced innumerable engineering problems, which he had to solve before the Crossley would be fully functional. For one, the spectrograph he inherited was so large that it had to be removed from the telescope each time the dome needed to be shut. And the telescope's mounting, originally set so it would correctly track the stars in England, had to be realigned to account for Mount Hamilton's more southerly location. Then there was the need for a new eyepiece, as well as a drive clock to keep the telescope in sync with the moving sky. Chemicals had to be gathered for silvering the yard-wide mirror—silver nitrate, caustic potash, ammonia, and a reducing solution composed out of rock candy, nitric acid, alcohol, and water—and telephone wires extended from nearby astronomers' cottages to the dome, so there would be electric light to illuminate the guidewires in the eyepieces.

Making improvements in fits and starts—three steps forward, two back—Keeler and his associates at last got the telescope operating tolerably in September 1898, just four months after he arrived back at Lick. On the fifteenth of that month he tried out his camera for the first time. His opening target, Altair, the brightest star in the constellation Aquila, was out of focus, but another exposure, east of the star, was better. “The fainter stars look pretty sound, but the brighter ones show irregularities,