First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe Read Online Free Page A

his hand and contemplated it. It would help the telescope’s camera to talk to its computer. “Youdon’t design a thing like this,” he said. “You look and see what you’ve got. Then you build it.” Gunn figured that he could stick it like a limpet to the camera. He figured that if he flipped the toggle switch on the kludge to “scan”—he had written “scan” beside the switch to remind himself which way to throw it—the kludge would transform the Hale Telescope into a motion-picture scanner.
    He picked up an object that looked like a flare pistol. He said, “This is an eight-hundred-degree hair dryer.” He aimed it at the back of his hand and pulled the trigger to see if it worked. There was a whir and a smell of burning hair. “Mm!” he said. “It’s working.” He directed the hair dryer at a shrink-wrapped cable emerging from the kludge, and the cable shriveled. Then, picking up a soldering iron, a roll of wiring diagrams, and the kludge, Gunn ran out of the room. Astronomers call a set of nights on a telescope a “run,” and the term is not a metaphor. Gunn took an elevator up one level. He stepped out of the doors of the elevator and onto the main floor of the Hale dome, where stands the largest working telescope on earth.
    The Hale Telescope, which is the size of a small office building, was bathed in sodium light, and the light revealed gleams and glints of metal inside the dome. Whether accidentally or on purpose, the Hale dome is almost exactly the size of the Pantheon in Rome. Jim Gunn took a moment, as he often did, to run his eyes over the telescope. He would admit that he could never look up without a sense of disbelief at the last telescope built by George Ellery Hale. “More than slightly mind-boggling,” Gunn would say of it. Then Gunn hurried across the floor and ran up a set of stairs into a steel-mesh cage that hangs from the butt of the telescope. This cage is directly beneath the telescope’s main mirror—a concave mirror made of flame Pyrex glass two hundred inches (sixteen feet, eight inches) across and coated with a reflective layer of aluminum on its upper surface. The mirror has a hole in its center. The concave face of the mirror looks skyward through the tube of the telescope and gleams at night with reflections of stars, like a pool of water resting at the bottom of a well.
    Gunn spread his wiring diagrams on the floor of the cage under the mirror. He picked up a flashlight, which seemed to have died. “Dammit,” he growled, rapping the flashlight on the cage. Thebulb glowed a little. He pointed the flashlight around. The floor of the cage was littered with Allen wrenches, alligator pliers, screwdrivers, and rolls of tape. He pointed the flashlight up at a camera plugged into a socket at the base of the telescope, like a shell loaded into a cannon. “That’s 4-shooter,” he said. “It’s been in place a tad more than a year.” 4-shooter is the Hale Telescope’s main camera; Jim Gunn built it.
    Gunn clamped the flashlight between his knees and aimed it upward, in an attempt to throw some light on his camera, while he reached up with both hands and grabbed a hank of loose cables. He dredged a Swiss officer’s knife from his pocket, and with it he sliced open a cable. “Gah!” he grunted. He ripped away plastic tissue. “Come on there!” he said, pulling forth a rattail of multicolored wires. He began to graft various wires that were sticking out of the kludge into 4-shooter’s nervous system, using a soldering iron. “On a scale of one to ten,” he suddenly remarked, “this crisis is only a twenty.” He stabbed the soldering iron at a wire and a puff of smoke went up. “I’ve seen things go higher than twenty,” he added. “There is still a happiness at twenty.”
    The camera called 4-shooter is a white cylinder, five feet long and two and a half feet in diameter, and it weighs 1,500 pounds. Plugged into the bottom of the Hale Telescope, it pokes