look at it with Hubble as soon as possible, but we were afraid to go through any of the official routes in case the information leaked. I attached a detailed proposal just like the one that I would have submitted, but requested that the fewest people possible know about it. I sent the note by e-mail and sat back to look at a few more images of the sky, but within about two minutes I had already gotten a reply: Y ES !
I quickly set to work trying to figure out the right time to target the Hubble. We wanted to make a very precise measurement of the size, so we knew we wanted to take the pictures just as Object X was moving close to a distant star to which we could compare it. I called up archival images of the sky, had the computer draw in the path that Object X was going to take through the stars, and looked for a good time. I found that in only three weeks the object was going to skim past a bright star; the timing would be perfect. I designed the precise sequence of pictures for the Hubble telescope to take and then sat back to wait the three weeks.
Normally that three-week wait would have driven me crazy, but I had a distracting trip planned. I was flying out to Hawaii to use one of the the Keck telescopes—the largest telescopes in the world—to take a first really good look at Object X. Just as with any of the other great telescopes in the world, getting to use a Keck telescope requires writing a detailed proposal explaining what you will use the telescope for and why it is a good use of thetime. As usual, the proposal is read by other astronomers, and then three to nine months later you might find yourself assigned to a particular night at the telescope. Unfortunately for us, again, we didn’t know we were going to discover Object X ahead of time, so we couldn’t have already written the proposal. Luckily for us, though, I had written a proposal to do something else entirely at the Keck—to study the moons of Uranus for evidence of icy volcanoes—so I was scheduled to be at the telescope soon after our discovery. One of the unspoken rules of being at a telescope is that once you are there, the night is yours to do with what you want. Yes, I had planned to look for icy volcanoes, but looking at Object X would clearly be a much more interesting and pressing use of the time.
The Keck telescopes sit atop the currently dormant summit of the giant Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. At nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, the summit looks more like the sterile surface of the moon than part of a fertile tropical island. The only sign of wildlife I have come across up there was a mouse who must have hitchhiked up in an equipment shipment and who lived on the crumbs dropped by astronomers or others working inside the dome. If the mouse ever got itself locked out of the telescope, it would find nothing to eat for miles around.
While the majestic Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory looks like part spotless battleship, part elegant WPA dam, and part nineteenth-century high-rise, the monster Keck telescopes look like nothing but high-strung engineering projects. The dome at Palomar is mostly empty space, with the smooth outlines of the telescope truss looming high above in the darkness. The domes at Keck are the same size, but the mirrors on the telescopes are four times as big, meaning that the telescopes are so tightly crammed into the domes that there is nowhere to stand to even get a good perspective on what the telescopes look like.If you take one of the elevators that goes midway up a dome and step outside onto the metal platform encircling the telescope, you can walk around and get some idea of the different components—white girders, sprawling wires and cables, massive industrial-sized cranes—and you will find yourself looking directly into one of the two biggest telescopic mirrors in the world. It’s not one mirror, though; it is a bug eye of thirty-six smaller hexagonal mirrors all arranged into a
I quickly set to work trying to figure out the right time to target the Hubble. We wanted to make a very precise measurement of the size, so we knew we wanted to take the pictures just as Object X was moving close to a distant star to which we could compare it. I called up archival images of the sky, had the computer draw in the path that Object X was going to take through the stars, and looked for a good time. I found that in only three weeks the object was going to skim past a bright star; the timing would be perfect. I designed the precise sequence of pictures for the Hubble telescope to take and then sat back to wait the three weeks.
Normally that three-week wait would have driven me crazy, but I had a distracting trip planned. I was flying out to Hawaii to use one of the the Keck telescopes—the largest telescopes in the world—to take a first really good look at Object X. Just as with any of the other great telescopes in the world, getting to use a Keck telescope requires writing a detailed proposal explaining what you will use the telescope for and why it is a good use of thetime. As usual, the proposal is read by other astronomers, and then three to nine months later you might find yourself assigned to a particular night at the telescope. Unfortunately for us, again, we didn’t know we were going to discover Object X ahead of time, so we couldn’t have already written the proposal. Luckily for us, though, I had written a proposal to do something else entirely at the Keck—to study the moons of Uranus for evidence of icy volcanoes—so I was scheduled to be at the telescope soon after our discovery. One of the unspoken rules of being at a telescope is that once you are there, the night is yours to do with what you want. Yes, I had planned to look for icy volcanoes, but looking at Object X would clearly be a much more interesting and pressing use of the time.
The Keck telescopes sit atop the currently dormant summit of the giant Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. At nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, the summit looks more like the sterile surface of the moon than part of a fertile tropical island. The only sign of wildlife I have come across up there was a mouse who must have hitchhiked up in an equipment shipment and who lived on the crumbs dropped by astronomers or others working inside the dome. If the mouse ever got itself locked out of the telescope, it would find nothing to eat for miles around.
While the majestic Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory looks like part spotless battleship, part elegant WPA dam, and part nineteenth-century high-rise, the monster Keck telescopes look like nothing but high-strung engineering projects. The dome at Palomar is mostly empty space, with the smooth outlines of the telescope truss looming high above in the darkness. The domes at Keck are the same size, but the mirrors on the telescopes are four times as big, meaning that the telescopes are so tightly crammed into the domes that there is nowhere to stand to even get a good perspective on what the telescopes look like.If you take one of the elevators that goes midway up a dome and step outside onto the metal platform encircling the telescope, you can walk around and get some idea of the different components—white girders, sprawling wires and cables, massive industrial-sized cranes—and you will find yourself looking directly into one of the two biggest telescopic mirrors in the world. It’s not one mirror, though; it is a bug eye of thirty-six smaller hexagonal mirrors all arranged into a
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