Moonwatching
Last night was fun, the girl and I had the opportunity to visit a retired professor in his telescope. The event has been put off for many months due to bad weather but when we arrived at the astronomy department there were some twenty to thirty other grads there from college.
We all trouped up into the dome and it took me a while to identify from all the heavily clothed people who was the professor. He was a small man made twice his real size by the down coat and trousers he was wearing, the dome was open to the freezing point air outside.
The telescope itself was a clunky 1960s reflector with just under a metre diameter on the primary reflector, the eye-piece had been cannibalised from a 19th century telescope. A high-tech machine for its time it was clearly the type of equipment the astronomy graduate students ignored instead relying on slots on some Hawaiian telescope to collect their data. This left the microscope to our professor, now retired.
The professor himself was unknown to us but clearly well-known throughout his field. He had invented the modern way of measuring the red-shift of stars, he must have been a young man then. The establishment at the time had declared it would never work, the truth, of course, was the fact that the idea was so elegant that they were jealous.
For the past 30 years he has been studying binary stars and star clusters recording their orbits by measuring their speed towards and away from us. Going up to the telescope tracking the star with one cold hand, his eye fixed to the eyepiece. He has published his findings in a series of papers, the longest series of papers ever, he is currently at 177 papers; the only person ever to get close to 100.
The submission of number one hundred was marked with an international conference in his honour in Switzerland. This unassuming man had asked the departmental secretary if perhaps a celebration in the department might be a good idea, he was told that if he provided a cake they were sure some people could be found to eat it.
Ignored by his department, last year he spent 163 nights observing in the telescope and he continues to build up a dataset covering over thirty years. He measures the orbits of a catalogue of binary stars that will probably never be equalled. The orbits themselves take between a few days and several years, he feels his time has been well spent, what's more, a retired bachelor, what else would he do?
The moon itself was beautiful, the science was fascinating. We stayed, as the core of a hard-core, when the majority had left for warm rum and warm surroundings, and talked about the science some more. As a demonstration he used his instrument to measure the "speed" of the rings of Saturn. One side was at +30 km/s the other at -32 km/s. This shows you the speed at which the rings of Saturn orbit but also says something about the relative movement of the Sun, Saturn and Earth.
Looking out of the dome I noticed a bank of fast growing coniferous trees between the dome and the road. I asked him if they had been put there specifically to block stray light that might fall into the telescope. He said yes, he'd asked for them to be put there and in-fact in recent years they'd grown too tall and he'd got them lopped off a bit. This why I liked him so much, most researchers are stuck in the here and now, but this man was different: he had the foresight and patience to let trees grow.
We all trouped up into the dome and it took me a while to identify from all the heavily clothed people who was the professor. He was a small man made twice his real size by the down coat and trousers he was wearing, the dome was open to the freezing point air outside.
The telescope itself was a clunky 1960s reflector with just under a metre diameter on the primary reflector, the eye-piece had been cannibalised from a 19th century telescope. A high-tech machine for its time it was clearly the type of equipment the astronomy graduate students ignored instead relying on slots on some Hawaiian telescope to collect their data. This left the microscope to our professor, now retired.
The professor himself was unknown to us but clearly well-known throughout his field. He had invented the modern way of measuring the red-shift of stars, he must have been a young man then. The establishment at the time had declared it would never work, the truth, of course, was the fact that the idea was so elegant that they were jealous.
For the past 30 years he has been studying binary stars and star clusters recording their orbits by measuring their speed towards and away from us. Going up to the telescope tracking the star with one cold hand, his eye fixed to the eyepiece. He has published his findings in a series of papers, the longest series of papers ever, he is currently at 177 papers; the only person ever to get close to 100.
The submission of number one hundred was marked with an international conference in his honour in Switzerland. This unassuming man had asked the departmental secretary if perhaps a celebration in the department might be a good idea, he was told that if he provided a cake they were sure some people could be found to eat it.
Ignored by his department, last year he spent 163 nights observing in the telescope and he continues to build up a dataset covering over thirty years. He measures the orbits of a catalogue of binary stars that will probably never be equalled. The orbits themselves take between a few days and several years, he feels his time has been well spent, what's more, a retired bachelor, what else would he do?
The moon itself was beautiful, the science was fascinating. We stayed, as the core of a hard-core, when the majority had left for warm rum and warm surroundings, and talked about the science some more. As a demonstration he used his instrument to measure the "speed" of the rings of Saturn. One side was at +30 km/s the other at -32 km/s. This shows you the speed at which the rings of Saturn orbit but also says something about the relative movement of the Sun, Saturn and Earth.
Looking out of the dome I noticed a bank of fast growing coniferous trees between the dome and the road. I asked him if they had been put there specifically to block stray light that might fall into the telescope. He said yes, he'd asked for them to be put there and in-fact in recent years they'd grown too tall and he'd got them lopped off a bit. This why I liked him so much, most researchers are stuck in the here and now, but this man was different: he had the foresight and patience to let trees grow.