The Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak Page B

Lick Observatory as a graduate student, but his inadequate preparation in science put up roadblocks. Keeler, Lick's director at the time, was looking for someone more professionally skilled in spectroscopy. Curtis was finally offered a fellowship at the University of Virginia, where for his PhD he reluctantly focused on a more mathematical topic, celestial mechanics, although along the way he made sure to get as much instrumental experience as possible. It was a risky move. He was resigning from a college professorship to start anew as a student in a field in which he had no prior training—and with a growing family to support as well.

    Serendipity offered an assist. Just as Curtis was headed east in 1900 to begin his doctoral studies, Lick astronomers William Campbell and Charles Perrine were traveling to Georgia to scrutinize a solar eclipse, whose shadow was scheduled to cut across the southeastern United States. Curtis signed on as a helper, saying he was “ready and glad to be put at anything from a shovel up.” Given this opportunity, he proved to the Lick men that he could handle a telescope and spectrograph as if he had been using them all his life. Campbell took notice. As soon as Curtis finished his degree at Virginia in 1902, Campbell, by then Lick's director, hired him on as an assistant. To Curtis, having lived on a small mountain in Virginia was simply good training for a life on Mount Hamilton, where kids hunted rattlesnakes for fun in the summertime.
    Curtis arrived at Lick covered in thick yellow dust from the long stagecoach ride, raring to begin his research straightaway. For the first few years, he focused on traditional Lick specialties, such as measuring stellar velocities, computing the orbits of binary stars, and going on solar-eclipse expeditions. Life was fairly routine, until one memorable April morning in 1906 when the mountain experienced a minor temblor. Damage was minimal at the observatory—a few coal-oil lamps overturned, loosened bricks on some of the buildings—but looking toward San Francisco, Lick residents saw an enormous tower of black smoke. They didn't realize how serious the disaster was until noon, when the daily stage from San Jose, which normally ran like clockwork, never showed up. By evening the astronomers turned Lick's 12-inch telescope completely horizontal and aimed it toward the Golden Gate, the strait connecting San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Through the scope they saw three miles of fire-front, burning fiercely. “And, naturally, the lens inverted everything, so we saw buildings fall up and flames sweep down—which was a weird, weird sight…. It reminded me of… Dante's Inferno,” said Douglas Aitken, who had lived on the mountain at the time as a young boy.
    Curtis missed all the excitement because two months earlier he had arrived in Chile to head up Lick's southern station on the summit of San Cristobal, on the outskirts of Santiago. With him were his mother, wife, and three small children. After a few years they became so comfortably settled in Chile that they contemplated an extended stay, having become fluent in Spanish and grown fond of the South American lifestyle. “Queer how completely we seem to have taken root here,” noted Curtis. But in 1909 Curtis received an unexpected invitation to return to Lick, not as an assistant or associate, but as a senior astronomer. Short on staff, the observatory needed an experienced hand to work with the Crossley reflector. In accepting the post, Curtis became Keeler's anointed successor, the next in line to tackle the mystery of the spiral nebulae.

    Curtis first spent time getting to know the Crossley's strengths and weaknesses: What were the faintest stars it could photograph? How many hours of exposure were required? He had the good fortune to start his new venture just as a famous celestial visitor, Halley's Comet, visibly reappeared in the skies in 1910, as it did every seventy-six or so years,