The eerily silent mountaintop, surrounded by rolling coastal range thick with green trees and wheat-colored grass giving the terrain a permanently autumnal look, is haunted by foxes, badgers, tarantulas, bobcats, skunks, deer, wild pigs and occasional cougars. A few inches of snow fell in early June. After dark, toward the west and south, the sodium-yellow glow of San Jose and smaller towns filters through valley hazes. On really dark nights they resemble minor galaxies.
On the misty eastern horizon rose the pumpkin-orange moon, the central actor in a predawn celestial drama. Overhead the sky thronged with twinkling stars and ghostly galaxies, oceans of them shimmering across a cosmos too vast and complex to grasp. Astronomers struggle to observe a far closer, lesser light, a mere pinprick of luminosity they hope would briefly flare on the moon's shadowy underside, a pinprick heralding the end of the historic Lunar Prospector space mission and perhaps final proof of a science-fictionish hypothesis. Flashlight beams bobbed through Lick's dark corridors as other astronomers pursued an equally glamorous task: seeking planets orbiting distant stars. This century-old observatory atop Mt Hamilton is the Bay Area's No. 1 eye on the cosmos - a veritable village of telescope domes big and small, where astronomers and students map the universe while most Northern Californians sleep.
Gazing at a spectacular reddish-orange Pacific sunset, energetic, bright-eyed resident astronomer Elinor Gates, 31, exclaimed with wide-eyed amazement: "I keep thinking: They let me work here! Astronomy's so romantic. Space is so huge it's got a real gee-whiz factor. Who could not be interested?" she demanded as if asking the world's most obvious question. Gates has a nearby apartment on the mountain. Native to Woodbridge CT where her mother was a chemist, her father a mathematician and her stepfather a physicist, she speaks of the heavens with the bubbly enthusiasm, clarity and erudition of a budding Carl Sagan.
At 2:51 a m Saturday Gates and colleague Debra Fischer huddled in different observatories on the mountain and watched the moon. 240,000 miles away the Bay Area's emissary to the moon - the $63 million Lunar Prospector robot, built and operated by local scientists and engineers - plunged to its doom on the lunar surface. Would the robot's crash-landing be visible from Earth? Although the odds were against it Fischer, Gates and professional and amateur astronomers worldwide hoped to see something - anything - of its demise. The robot was expected to hit the moon at faster than a mile a second with a slight chance of spewing clouds tall enough to be seen from Earth, providing smoking-gun confirmation of Prospector's most celebrated discovery, the existence of frozen water in permanently shadowed, hence permanently frigid, craters at the lunar poles. The spaceship indirectly detected the ice, a relic of countless fallen comets plunking onto the lunar surface for billions of years like so many dropped ice cream cones, using a sensor detecting neutron particles reflected by water molecules.
In Saturday's wee hours Gates and Fischer saw no immediate evidence of Lunar Prospector's kamikaze crash into an unnamed crater in the lunar outback. No spark of light, no vapor plume, no dust cloud. Minutes ticked by in Gates' office, where she huddled not over a telescope like astronomers of yore but over a colorful computer work station. Its screen showed an image of the moon, transmitted electronically from an adjacent building housing the 40-inch reflecting telescope. The moon's limb - where visible terrain ends and the black void of space begins - showed no telltales glows or smudges indicating Lunar Prospector's demise, as if the space probe had vanished without a trace.
Anxiously she kept glancing at her computer, which displayed among other things a window linked to her e-mail service. By e-mail she could remain in near-instant contact with astronomers observing elsewhere, for example at McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas, or at Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. If something obvious happened on the moon she expects it would have hit the e-mail by now. Yet no new e-mail flooded in. At 3:03 a m her office phone rang. Fischer called from another observatory at the Lick complex attached to the dome housing the giant 120-inch
telescope, once a titan of the astronomical world, now the 8th-largest telescope of its kind anywhere.
Fischer and a colleague used a spectrograph to look for evidence of sodium rising from the moon's surface. Using computers in a different office, Fischer saw no immediate evidence of sodium. They have the same problem we are, Gates said afterward with a sigh. Their inability to see a vapor or dust cloud, or a sodium signal from dust, didn't mean these didn't exist. They might be so dim they were washed out by the brilliance of the almost-full moon, and might be detected in closer analysis of the data. No results doesn't mean there's no ice in that crater. Similar disappointment greeted other observers. It's too early to draw conclusions.
Fischer was in the news in April when she and colleagues worldwide discovered the first known multiple-planet system beyond our own - a system of at least 3 planets orbiting the star Upsilon Andromedae 44 light-years away. A light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. The search for extrasolar planets, pioneered in the mid-1990s, is now big business at Lick. A favorite extrasolar planet-spotting technique is to look for subtle Doppler shifts in dark lines in the rainbow-like spectra of light from stars. Shifts are caused by variations in the stars' positions caused by back-and-forth gravitational tugs of unseen planets orbiting them. Although the stars are tens of trillions of miles away, spectrographs can sense a Doppler shift as slight as 10 feet a second, as fast as you can ride a bike.
Astronomers Laurance Doyle and Lee Rottlers detected extrasolar planets by training a Lick telescope on a star in the constellation Draco and measure extremely faint drops in its brightness caused by a planet orbiting that star and passing briefly between it and Earth, using a 19th century telescope to achieve a 21st century goal. By this technique Doyle hopes to make the first discovery of an extrasolar planet roughly the size of Earth. Previous astronomers discovered planets the size of Jupiter. Serious as extrasolar planet searching sounds, it has its light-hearted moments. Scurrying with her flashlight through the observatory's darkness - it's kept dark so stray light won't interfere with observations - Fischer teased a colleague alone in an office by imitating a ghost spookily calling out his name: "Lee-e-e-e-e Rott-t-t-t-l-l-l-ers!" Moscow, Idaho, students suggested names for the new planets she and her colleagues found. Names included Twopiter for a planet thought to be twice as massive as Jupiter, Fourpiter for one 4 times as massive, and Dinky for the smallest planet. The names caught on.
Building the world's largest amateur telescope
It's the same drill with any big project. You do heavy lifting. You tweak it. You polish it. 20 core volunteers working in a bland Santa Clara warehouse, lift, tweak and polish - and polish and polish and polish and polish. Group 70 wants to build the world's largest amateur telescope, with a 6-foot main mirror, 10 times the size of typical amateur telescopes, sending Internet images to astronomers anywhere. It started in 1988 with an astronomy magazine classified. For sale: 3,000-pound glass disc poured in 1938 as raw material for a telescope. Never used. Stored in Australia. An astronomy fan saw the ad. E-mail did most of the rest. A meeting was set, forming Group 70 (members first thought the disc was 70 inches) raising $25,000 among themselves to buy the glass.
This is no Internet project. More like the Colorado River etching the Grand Canyon. Work started pre-Pentium. Before eBay. 6-month product cycles? Ha! Lucky to do it in 1 lifetime. It's slow work, forming the rough glass into a parabola by grinding and then polishing, polishing, polishing, slower still with volunteer labor and scrap equipment. The glass lies on a table. The jury-rigged polisher sweeps back and forth. The machine looks like a car wreck, made of motorcycle chains, a trailer hitch, free weights and junked metal. Hour after hour, micron by micron, it works. It's best to think ahead to when the glass will be an aid to view the heavens from home computers. Polishing will continue for months. Then a smaller mirror needs to be polished. Obstacles include where to put the telescope, maybe northern California, and dwindling money. Group 70 accepts tax-deductible donations. The telescope is years away.