Read First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe for Free Online

said. He and Zimmerman suddenly stood up and walked out of the room.
    Schmidt laughed. “I didn’t mean that literally!” he called after them.

    At twilight, on a catwalk that encircled the Hale dome, Juan Carrasco and Don Schneider studied the rising fog, which seemed to be pooling in nearby valleys. Don craned his neck, looking up. He said, “What do you think the weather’s going to do, Juan?”
    Juan pointed to the west. He said, “There’s Venus.”
    “I suppose you consider that a good sign.”
    “Oh, yes,” Juan said.
    “This fog is definitely getting worse,” Don said, glancing around. Juan studied a gauge. “The humidity isn’t bad.”
    “That’s if you believe instruments.”
    Juan slapped the wall, feeling for dew. “Tricky,” he said.
    “There’s definitely some structure up there in the atmosphere. Kind of scuzzy,” Don said.
    “High haze can improve the seeing.”
    “Have you ever thought of running for political office, Juan?”
    They walked around to the north side of the dome, traveling clockwise on the catwalk. The fog had drowned the Los Angeles basin but had left the San Gabriel Mountains bare and stark on the horizon. The peeping toads had grown louder, welcoming the fog. There were three other telescopes in operation on Palomar Mountain, apart from the Hale Telescope, and as Juan and Don circled, they could see the dome of each telescope in turn: the forty-eight-inch Schmidt telescope, which was being used to make an atlas of the sky; the eighteen-inch Schmidt telescope, which these days was used mostly by the Shoemakers and other planetary astronomers to search for asteroids that could hit the earth; and the sixty-inch Oscar Mayer Telescope, a general-purpose instrument endowed by the family of the hot-dog baron, because Oscar Mayer had liked stars.
    Juan made up his mind about the fog. “I think we’ll be all right,” he said. Don nodded, went indoors to a red button located on the inside wall of the dome, and pressed it. The dome shutters began to move open, drawing apart like eyelids, exposing the telescope to the cosmos. A knife-blade of sky appeared overhead, slowly fattening into a crescent speckled with early stars. The Hale Telescope became a network of shadows against the sky.
    The job of the night assistant is to operate the telescope for the astronomer. This not only promotes efficiency but also prevents the astronomer from wrecking the telescope. Given half a chance, an astronomer will cleverly destroy a telescope. For that reason the Palomar night assistants had been given authority over the astronomers in many matters, especially when it came to deciding whether to open or close the dome of the Hale. This was an important decision. For example, a professional astronomer, famished for light, might open the Hale during cold, humid weather. That could let a dew settle on the mirror. The dew could mix with dust on the mirror, which would turn into an acid mud that could etch the glass, thus destroying the mirror in a few hours. The Hale mirror is the size of a living room floor. It weighs fourteen and a half tons. It required fifteen years to make, from the first failed casting in 1934 to the final figuring of the glass in 1949—ground down to a concave dish and polished to a precision of four-millionthsof an inch over its entire surface. Four-millionths of an inch is a distance equivalent to splitting the thickness of this page one thousand times.
    Inside the data room, Jim Gunn typed instructions to the computer. Maarten Schmidt sat at his desk. Schmidt said, “I cannot tell if they are going to get everything fixed. I am not as teh-nically developed as Jim.” He pronounced the word
technically
with a soft
ch
—a Dutch accent. The recent unaccountable loss of his 1950-model Eveready flashlight had touched Maarten Schmidt with a small sorrow, a fact that revealed the nature of his feelings toward electronic devices. But he knew what he wanted from the