The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [7]
In Keeler's time the universe was a far simpler place, at least to our modern-day eyes. The cosmos consisted solely of a vast collection of stars, a disk-shaped distribution somewhat flattened, with the Sun situated in an honored place near the center. Beyond that, said most astronomers, was simply a void—possibly extending out to infinity.
But there were oddities in the celestial sky, difficult to explain. There were these mysterious nebulae that through a telescope looked like watery whirlpools, mistlike clouds exhibiting spiraling shapes. Astronomers were long acquainted with other types of nebulae, such as the vast and chaotic cloud in Orion and the ringlike nebulae, but these vaporous objects resided within the bounds of the Milky Way. The spiral nebulae, on the other hand, were solely found away from the milky band of our galaxy. Why did they prefer the more open cosmic spaces, as if they were avoiding the stars? Astronomers didn't have a good, rational explanation for this unique distribution. Keeler, to his credit, made these nebulae his prime subject for investigation, at a time when the study of stars and planets was far more attractive to astronomers. Before the introduction of photography, the number of nebulous clouds in the heavens was estimated to be in the thousands. Mounting a camera onto his reflecting telescope, Keeler began to realize there were likely tens of thousands. His discovery was a revelation, and in making this masterful leap in observing, Keeler opened up a vast new arena for astronomy.
Keeler's celestial curiosity may have initially been sparked by a dramatic solar eclipse he witnessed in 1869 when he was eleven—its narrow path of totality creating a sensation as the Moon's shadow stretched across the United States. A few months later, his family moved from Illinois to Mayport, Florida, where Keeler was homeschooled, surrounded by the stacks of Scientific Americans to which his father subscribed. Ordering some lenses from an optical dealer who advertised in the magazine, young Keeler built his first telescope—a 2½-inch refractor with a cedar tube. He was soon spending long nights at his scope drawing sketches of lunar craters and the planets. He was riding the wave of a new American fancy.
Earlier in the nineteenth century astronomical research in the United States had been a rather haphazard affair, until two key events dramatically altered the situation. In the autumn of 1833 people throughout the country witnessed a meteor storm, torrents of shooting stars, like no other. It was described as a “constant succession of fire balls, resembling sky rockets, radiating in all directions from a point in the heavens,” which led to this spectacular celestial fireworks show being called the “Falling of the Stars.” A decade later the public went agog once again over the Great Comet of 1843, proclaimed by Yale astronomer Denison Olmsted in that preelectric era as “the most remarkable in its appearance of all that have been seen in modern times.” The comet was visible even in daylight, with a nucleus as bright as the full Moon and a tail that stretched for nearly two million miles. Together, the meteor blizzard and the comet sparked a huge surge of public interest in the heavens. It also made U.S. politicians woefully aware of their country's lack of first-rate scientific institutions to study such captivating phenomena. The English novelist Frances Trollope, who spent some time in America in the 1820s, had found it “extraordinary that a people who loudly declare their respect for science, should be entirely without observatories. Neither at their seats of learning, nor in their cities, does anything of the kind exist.”
This deficiency was quickly remedied with the opening of observatories in both Cincinnati, Ohio, and Chapel Hill,