Word: palomar
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...five years, astronomers have been scanning the skies to become the first to sight one of history's most celebrated objects. Last week a Caltech team led by British Graduate Student David C. Jewitt, 24, and Staff Astronomer G. Edward Danielson, 43, won the cosmic sweepstakes. Using Palomar Observatory's 200-in. telescope, they spotted Halley's comet as a faint moving dot in the constellation Canis Minor. The comet has not been seen since 1911. A year earlier, its fiery appearance caused a rash of doomsday forecasts and end-of-the-world parties...
More than a billion miles away, just beyond Saturn's orbit, the lump of icy debris is only dimly lighted by the sun and distant stars. Even the big Palomar mirror could not have found it without a highly sensitive silicon-chip light detector called a charge-coupled device (CCD), used in place of a photographic plate. When the comet approaches for its hairpin swing around the sun in 1986, solar radiation will boil off volatile material, creating a glowing head and characteristic tail and perhaps another heavenly spectacle...
...Chicago college. The novel finds Corde far from home, stuck in a small apartment in Bucharest, waiting for his mother-in-law to die. Meditatively, he licks the wounds of recent Chicago battles--battles which rage unabated, awaiting his return. While ineptly ministering to the miseries of his emigre/astronomer ("Palomar calibre") wife. Minna (perhaps Bellow is losing his old feisttness: this protagonist is happily married, with no Renatas or Ramonas to scheme over him, no vicious wives trying to castrate him), and sucking down plum brandy. Corde explores the smoldering wreckage of life in Chicago, his and the city...
Using telescopes on Kitt Peak and Mount Hopkins in Arizona and Mount Palomar in California, they photographed patches of the night sky and got two-dimensional pictures showing the distribution of matter in a sector of space. To add the perspective of depth they used an astronomical yardstick called the red shift, a measure of how far an object has traveled based on how sharply its light is displaced toward the red end of the spectrum...
...glare from cities and highways can also spoil the view. As the twinkling of the stars shows, the dust and gases in the earth's atmosphere scatter heavenly light, thus limiting the effectiveness of every telescope, even such monsters as the 200-in. mirror atop California's Palomar Mountain...