Word: kecks
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Richard Ellis paces impatiently back and forth across a small room lined with computer terminals, trying to contain his mounting frustration. The British-born astronomer, now at Caltech, has been granted a single precious night to use one of the twin Keck telescopes, among the most powerful in the world. Last night he and his observing partner, a graduate student named Dan Stark, flew 3,000 miles, from Southern California to Hawaii, where the Kecks are located. And during most of the afternoon and early evening today, they've made their final plans for the "run," as astronomers call...
...things are not going right. It isn't the weather, which is what usually trips up stargazers. Here at Keck headquarters in the sleepy town of Waimea, nestled in the midst of cattle-ranching country on Hawaii's Big Island, thick clouds are scudding past, occasionally dipping low enough to send a driving mist across the grassy hills. But the telescopes are some 25 miles away and more than two miles up, in the thin, frigid air at the summit of the extinct volcano Mauna Kea. At an altitude of nearly 14,000 ft., the observatory sits well above...
...problem is that Keck 2, the scope Ellis and Stark have been assigned for the night, stubbornly refuses to focus. Time and again, the professional telescope operator who sits in a control room up on the summit and actually runs the mammoth instrument has issued the command that tells it to focus. Time and again, the focusing routine has responded to his commands by crashing. For half an hour, engineers have been trying to figure out what is going on--while the first of the precious celestial objects on Ellis and Stark's observing schedule sinks inexorably toward the horizon...
...faraway objects. The bigger a telescope, the more of a distant galaxy's meager light it can gather--just as a swimming pool catches more rain than a bucket. So astronomers are looking forward to a ground-based monster with nearly 10 times the light-gathering area of the Keck, a space telescope more than 10 times as big as the Hubble and several radio telescopes with unprecedented sensitivity. Meanwhile, using the basic laws of physics, sophisticated computer simulations and tantalizing hints from existing telescopes, astronomers have put together a plausible scenario of what must have happened during the Dark...
...away and have created weird optical effects, including multiple images of faraway quasars. If you look at a massive cluster of galaxies, Ellis figured, you might see amplified images of more distant galaxies, too faint to be seen otherwise. So a year or two ago, he started aiming the Keck at galactic clusters, and along with Stark, he identified six candidate objects. To make certain that these were truly far away, the pair has come back to the Keck for a second, more intensive look. "We want to be absolutely sure we aren't fooling ourselves," says Ellis. "Before...