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truth he did neither. According to a later biographer, Gale Christianson, the closest Hubble came to a legal career was translating what may have been legal correspondence for a Louisville import company conducting business in South America. There is no evidence whatsoever that Hubble handled a professional legal case, despite what he wrote his chums back in England. Hubble was adding more mythic gloss to his résumé. All this time he was actually teaching at the high school in New Albany, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville. For a year he taught physics, mathematics, and Spanish—an experience he never openly discussed later, even though his students were obviously fond of him. After Hubble coached their basketball team to an undefeated season and a third-place finish in the state tournament, they lovingly dedicated the school's 1914 yearbook to him.

High school teaching, though, hardly satisfied Hubble's steadfast hunger for a more illustrious career. He would come to see the fellow Rhodes scholars in his group become respected journalists, authors, poets, and congressmen. He yearned to match their potential in the field of science. “So I chucked the law,” Hubble later reminisced, maintaining the fiction of having had a legal career, “and went back to astronomy and the test was this—I knew it was astronomy that mattered and that I would be happy in astronomy if I turned out to be second-rate or third-rate.”

Earliest known photo of Edwin Hubble with a telescope. Taken in 1914

in New Albany, Indiana, upon his return from Oxford. (Reproduced by

permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

With his father's daunting presence no longer an obstacle to his long-standing aspiration, Hubble contacted his favorite astronomy professor at Chicago, Forest Ray Moulton, to inquire about returning for graduate studies. Moulton wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to Edwin Frost, then director of the Yerkes Observatory. Hubble, said Moulton, was a “splendid specimen,” who showed “exceptional ability” in science. Frost promptly took him on, offering a scholarship that covered his $120 tuition and provided $30 a month for basic living expenses.

Frost, who hailed from New England, had joined the staff of Yerkes just months after it first opened in 1897, chosen by Hale to be its first professor of astrophysics. He was best known for his measurements of the radial velocities of the stars (how fast they were moving either toward or away from the Earth) and also served as managing editor of the Astrophysical Journal. One day he received a telegraph from a reporter with a plea: “Send us three hundred words expressing your ideas on the habit-ability of Mars.” A man of good humor, Frost replied, “Three hundred words unnecessary—three enough—no one knows.”

As director, Frost divided the nights at Yerkes, with astronomers working only the first or second half, so they could get some sleep. Certain hours were given over to spectroscopic work, other hours for determining the distances to the stars. In the remaining hours, the observers would carry out such tasks as photometric studies—determining the brightness of stars—or visually observing interesting objects, such as double stars.

In the winter temperatures at Yerkes could reach 15° to 20° F below zero, yet the dome couldn't be warmed as the temperature had to closely match that of the outside. Otherwise, currents of warm air rising in front of the lens would spoil the resolution of the celestial objects in the telescope's sight. “Those who have visited a large observatory on such a night,” Frost recalled, “say that they will never forget that cold eerie place, silent except for the persistent ghostly ticking of the driving clock and the wind howling around the slit in the dome. But there the astronomer sits in his Eskimo suit or fur coat and cap with his eye glued to the eyepiece of the telescope, watching closely to see that his star does not drift away from the crossed spider-threads which mark the center of his field while a plate is being exposed.”