Word: palomar
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Some 30 evenings a year, Astronomer Maarten Schmidt, 36, struggles with an electrically heated flight suit and enters the great, silvery dome of California's Mount Palomar Observatory. There, his tall, gangling frame seems suddenly reduced to Lilliputian proportions by the mammoth, 200-in. telescope that towers above him. An elevator hauls him slowly to a cylindrical observer's cage inside the telescope itself, and the dome's curved doors slide open to the cold mountain air. Perched high above the observatory floor, with classical music from an all-night Los Angeles radio station in the background...
...energy on earth. For science is fast advancing into areas where the old theories may no longer apply, where the old rules may no longer work. And if Maarten Schmidt's inspired deductions point the way toward totally new equations to account for the nature of the cosmos, Palomar's telescope will have led man to his closest glimpse of universal truths...
Using the 200-in. giant at Palomar, Astronomers Allan Sandage and Jesse Greenstein channeled the faint light from a quasar through spectrographs, using exposures as long as six or seven hours to produce a usuable image on their film. Their painstaking labor produced tiny spectrograms that contained no color, only shadings of black and white, and were one-third of an inch long and a thousandth of an inch thick. Under the microscope, however, Sandage and Greenstein were barely able to discern strange patterns and spectral lines that had never before been observed in stellar spectra. Genuinely puzzled, Greenstein began...
...fellowship. With it he gained entrée into the stimulating atmosphere of Pasadena's California Institute of Technology, and access to the fabulous astronomical complex in Southern California. There, all within easy driving distance of Los Angeles, the world's greatest telescopes point skyward. Atop Mount Palomar is the 200-in. Hale telescope and a 48-in. Schmidt (no relation) wide-angle scope. On Mount Wilson is a 100-in. telescope, one of the world's largest, and a 60-in. instrument that would be the pride of most other observatories. The twin 90-ft. antennas...
Spectral Patterns. For years, astronomers observed objects known as "blue stars"-stars that are so hot that a large part of the light they give is blue. While studying quasars with the Palomar telescope, Sandage got interested in the blue stars, and he found that a number of them seemed to be "interlopers" among the quasars. Those closest to earth, he discovered, are the familiar blue stars. But some of those fainter than 14.5 magnitude are remarkably similar to quasars. When photographed with blue filters, they show an excess of ultraviolet energy, which is a characteristic of quasars...