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rain than clear skies. First put into operation in 1845, this reflector, when erect, was said to resemble one of the ancient round towers of Ireland and was dubbed the “Leviathan of Parsontown.” “Sweeping down from the moat towards the lake, stand two noble masonery walls,” reported a houseguest. “They are turreted and clad with ivy, and considerably loftier than any ordinary house. As the visitor approaches, he will see between those walls what may at first sight appear to him to be the funnel of a steamer lying down horizontally.” It was the telescope's immense wooden tube, which was more than fifty feet long and held a polished metal mirror six feet in diameter. This mirror provided fourteen times more surface area for collecting light than Herschel's most productive telescope. A pulley system, attached to the top of the tube, allowed the telescope to be pointed by two men on the ground. A series of staircases and galleries provided the observer access to the mouth of the great tube. It was an astounding telescope size for its time and wouldn't be matched for another seven decades.

The Leviathan's prime targets were the “strange stellar cloudlets that fleck the dark vault of the heavens.” Rosse was determined to see if he could resolve the nebulae—those that remained stubbornly cloudlike—into stars. But what he turned up was something even more intriguing.

In the spring of 1845, Rosse and his assistant Johnstone Stoney began to study the fifty-first nebula, M51, in Messier's famous catalog. When William Herschel viewed it years earlier, he saw only a bright round nebula; his son later observed it as a ring with two branches. But Rosse, to his amazement, detected a distinct coiling, arms of gas wrapped around M51's center like a whirling pinwheel. No one had ever anticipated something like this. Some nebulae were shaped like spirals, “a structure and arrangement more wonderful and inexplicable than anything which had hitherto been known to exist,” reported Great Britain's Royal Astronomical Society.

In these days before astrophotography, Rosse sketched a picture of the configuration with painstaking care. “With each successive increase of optical power, the structure has become more complicated and more unlike anything which we could picture to ourselves,” Rosse reported. “That such a system should exist, without internal movement, seems to be in the highest degree improbable.” This is when M51 came to be called the Whirlpool because of the striking swirl of its appearance. Rosse went on to discern more than a dozen such spiral nebulae in the celestial sky.

A drawing of Lord Rosse's Leviathan (From Philosophical Transactions of

the Royal Society of London 151 [1861]: 681-745, Plate XXIV)

Despite Rosse's gorgeous drawings, a few believed the spiraling lanes of nebulous matter “existed only in the imagination of the astronomer.” Rosse's mirror was so large—its light-gathering power so great—that no other telescope could verify his find. But for others, the discovery revived and energized Herschel's earlier speculation that other systems of stars resided outside the borders of the Milky Way. Scottish astronomer and science popularizer John P. Nichol was certainly thrilled, for he had long been pushing the idea that “numerous firmaments, glorious as ours, float through immensity, doubtless forming one stupendous system.” He was a Kantian. Nichol thought of a galaxy (what he called a “grand group”) as the chief feature in the universe. “It is indeed wholly unlikely that our group, as a single instance of a species, should rest alone and forlorn amidst desert untenanted Space,” he wrote. The universe, to Nichol, was “thronged with similar clusters, separated far from each other as islands in the great Sea.” Some “are situated so deep in space,” he went on, “that no ray from them could reach our Earth, until after travelling through the intervening abysses, during centuries whose number stuns the imagination.” He even imagined some so far distant that their light left “at an epoch farther back into the Past than this