Book review: First Light

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Pete
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Book review: First Light

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Book review: First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

This non-fiction book on astronomy and astronomers was written by Richard Preston in 1987, but I only recently discovered it at the library. And what a lovely discovery it was. I’m stealing a lot of this verbiage from on-line articles as there’s no need to reinvent parts of their reviews.

The central character of First Light is the Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain, which was the world's biggest telescope for more than three decades. Preston describes its history and technical details, up until the invention of the CCD camera.

The book’s broken into four parts.

Part one (Big Eye) describes the Hale telescope and it’s many quirks. Duct tape apparently was pretty important to the astronomers who were hanging equipment and the ex barber who was the primary telescope operator. And it is claimed that if the 200” primary mirror were the size of the US, the deviation of the mirror surface from perfect would not exceed 4 inches! (Wonder how that can be when I recall John Dobson disdainfully referring to the Hale as “a pig.”)

The second part (The Shoemaker Comets) describes the efforts of Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker to get a handle on Trojan/Greek asteroids and near Earth asteroids using film and a 12” Schmidt camera named “Little Eye.” Since this is the kind of stuff I do I was impressed with how awfully difficult they had it when working with film. Gene was on the payroll but since NASA didn’t allow any trace of nepotism Carolyn worked for free. Don’t know if Gene’s theory regarding comets being dragged into Jupiter’s Lagrangian points has been proved or disproved in the 17 years since the book was published but it’s an interesting theory.

Part three (Gadgeteers) focuses on one or two engineer/astronomers who were instrumental in the early stages of the Hubble telescope, and how one of the very first CCD cameras used on the 200” Hale was kluged together using an array of 4 CCD chips TI rejected when trying to make the first chips for the Hubble camera.

Part 4 (Discoveries) is delightful as astronomers lock the Big Eye in a fixed position and watch as it scans a swath of the sky in search of the earliest quasars. The first light of the title isn’t the scope’s first light back in ’48 but rather it’s rebirth in 1983 with the huge additional sensitivity provided by the jury-rigged CCD camera.

Running my own modest observatory I totally relate to the problems encountered with both Big Eye and Little Eye. And I also totally relate to asteroids & quasars. While very much out of date it’s still a great read for hands-on astronomers.

Pete 7 May 2014

p.s. Carolyn Shoemaker named an asteroid 3792 Preston.
Pete P.
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