Word: skies
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...calls "fog creeping through the bridge" pieces; in them he ranges rhapsodically from the hills (he claims there are 30) to the weather (which he says beats sex as the city's "Topic A"). He even manages to extol such dubious assets as the city's sky-high alcoholism rate and the fleas, which, according to Caen, "bite only tourists and newcomers" because the natives are "so full of garlic." At times, Garlic Lover Caen sounds as if he had distilled his high-calorie prose from the Reader's Digest's Picturesque Speech Department. Sample...
...satellite will not be launched in its orbit for a considerable time to come (no one wants to say just when), but that is no reason why the teams that are training to track it should stare at an empty sky. An airplane flying at moderate speed at a moderate altitude can pretend, for research purposes, to be a satellite swinging around its orbit at 18,000 m.p.h. 300 miles...
Minitrack. Last week at Blossom Point, Md., about 40 miles south of Washington, the Naval Research Laboratory showed how the satellite's feeble radio signals will be picked up. Nine enormous antennas scattered over a 25-acre field waited for whispers of energy from the sky. The satellite's role was played by a Navy airplane flying at 15,000 ft. and carrying the 13-oz. Minitrack radio transmitter that the real satellite will carry, its power suitably reduced to make up for the difference in altitude...
...observers arranged themselves after dark under an odd-looking "T" of iron pipe with dim lights glowing at the ends of its horizontal member. The T showed the meridian, and the observers trained their telescopes so that their overlapping fields covered a north-and-south slice of sky through which the satellite should pass...
When the airplane passed over for the first time, dark clouds above it made the light faintly visible to the naked eye. When the clouds cleared away, the light could not be seen against the starry sky except with the low-powered telescopes. They picked it up easily, like a sixth-magnitude star...