Word: palomar
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...time warp of translation, not all new books by Italo Calvino that appear in English are actually new. Both Marcovaldo (1983) and Difficult Loves (1984) offered short stories that the Italian author wrote more than two decades ago, when his talents were entertainingly restricted to earthly realities. Mr. Palomar, on the other hand, belongs to the later vintage of Calvino's fiction. Like such works as Cosmicomics (1968) and Invisible Cities (1974), this novel uses the recognizable world primarily as an excuse for the launching of antic metaphysics...
...hero emerges through a series of vignettes connected to one another only by his obsession. It is no accident that Mr. Palomar bears the name of a famous observatory, for he "has decided that his chief activity will be looking at things from the outside." This sounds easier than it proves to be, at least for someone of Mr. Palomar's temperament. For one thing, he can never be sure that he has correctly witnessed any phenomenon. His repeated attempts to view the "avalanche of simultaneous events that we call the universe" lead him to a pessimistic conclusion...
Some 400 miles to the southeast, atop snow-covered Mount Palomar, Eugene Shoemaker, a geologist on leave from the U.S. Geological Survey, and his wife Carolyn, an asteroid astronomer, scurry around the unheated dome of the 18- in. Schmidt telescope. They photograph the sky in four-minute exposures, hunting for fast-moving objects against the background of the fixed stars. So far their Palomar study has identified 25 asteroids that cross the earth's orbit, bringing the known total to 60. Asteroids like this, they think, have occasionally crashed into the earth with catastrophic consequences, and they strive to calculate...
...million grant to Caltech by the W.M. Keck Foundation, will have an innovative mirror system nearly 400 in. in diameter, which is twice the width and has four times the light-gathering capacity of today's reigning optical telescope, the 200-in. Hale device at Mount Palomar, Calif. When astronomers begin using the new telescope in 1992, it will push back the visible limits of the universe by billions of light years. Says Howard Keck, president of the foundation: "I'm told it will permit one to see the light of a single candle from the distance of the moon...
...accomplished by either taking long-exposure photographs or using a larger mirror system to collect the light. Many astronomical photographs already take hours to make, but even then not enough photons can be gathered for a clear view of very faint objects. Hence the need for bigger mirrors. Complains Palomar Observatory Director Gerry Neugebauer: "We're photon starved...