Published in the April 15-28, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
When I was 7 or 8 years old, my father presented me with one of the best gifts he ever gave me – a small telescope he had purchased at a garage sale. I still have the telescope. The last time I used it was to view the transit of Venus in June 2012. Using a white cardboard to focus the image of a tiny dot of that planet in front of the glare of the Sun, I felt in awe by the size of the star at the heart of our solar system.
Magic awaits in the optics of telescopes. These devices allow us to peer through the keyhole of the door of curiosity and get a glimpse of the wonders that fill the universe. In the four decades since I first looked through that garage-sale telescope, I have been keen to see what the far more technologically advanced telescopes can show us.
The first time anyone thought about turning a telescope toward the heavens was four centuries ago. In July 1609, the great scientist Galileo was in Venice when he heard about a Flemish spectacle-maker who had placed a couple of lens in a tube, enabling a viewer to peer through the gadget and see ships and other far away objects with far greater detail. Galileo built a more powerful telescope and with it he saw the imperfections of craters and maria on the moon. It also enabled him to discover four moons orbiting the planet Jupiter. These discoveries added fuel to the then controversial idea of a sun-centered solar system — and it got him in trouble with the Catholic Church which since the days of the ancient astronomer Ptolemy had taught that the Earth held a special place as the universe’s center.
The next scientist to turn a telescope toward the heavens with significant results was William Herschel. A German-born musician who moved to Bath, England, in 1772 to serve as the composer and conductor of the city’s royal orchestra, Herschel became interested in star-gazing from the backyard observatory he built. During my time as a journalism student at San Jose State University, I studied abroad in Bath and the home I stayed in that semester was less than a mile from Herschel’s home where he had discovered the planet Uranus March 13, 1781. He had campaigned to name it “Georgium Sidus” after King George III, but instead it was named Uranus after the Greek god of the sky. The English monarch did show his appreciation to Herschel by knighting him and appointing him as the court astronomer. The pension this honor brought enabled Hershel to continue working as a musician as well as focusing on scientific pursuits — including the discovery of the infrared spectrum of light.
As I now write this column, I look out the Morgan Hill Life office window toward the north and see on the top of Mount Hamilton two white structures — domes that serve as the next great leap in history in telescopes. This is the site of the Lick Observatory, which is run by the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The first observatory on the mountain was built between 1876 and 1887 with a bequest of $700,000 (about $22 million today) from gold-rush pioneer James Lick. He had heard a California Academy of Sciences astronomer give a lecture in San Francisco on how Earth’s atmosphere distorted light coming from the stars, and that a telescope built on a high mountain top above much of the atmosphere would provide clearer images. Lick’s body is buried under the 36-inch refracting telescope which was the world’s largest refracting telescope from Jan. 3, 1888 to 1897 when another telescope took that honor. Lick’s telescope helped to discover a fifth moon around Jupiter, the first addition since Galileo’s time.
Other telescopes have been added to the Lick Observatory over the years. Among other space exploration activities, they have been involved in the hunt for extrasolar planets — or planets that orbit far-away stars.
It seems James Lick might have started something in terms of astronomical history in Santa Clara County. Silicon Valley was the place where the Hubble Space Telescope was put together by Lockheed Martin engineers. The world’s first space-based optical telescope was named after Edward Hubble, the scientist who discovered that the universe is expanding, a fact that helped to confirm the Big Bang theory. The Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, so it will celebrate its 25th year in space this month. Some of the engineers who designed and built it have made their homes here in Morgan Hill, so no doubt they must be proud of their telescope that has provided astronomical photos and scientific evidence that have enabled billions of people around the world to greater appreciate the grandeur and vast scale of the universe.
The city of Mountain View is also home to the SETI Institute, which was involved in a project to use a series of small-dish radio telescopes called the Allen Telescope Array to search for radio signals that might possibly have come from alien civilizations in other parts of the galaxy. The array is located 290 miles northeast of San Francisco and was funded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. It’s now managed by SRI International, a nonprofit research institute.
Since the day Galileo first aimed his simple lens and tube at the heavens, telescopes have played a significant role in helping humans understand their place in the cosmos. These optical devices have impacted our religious views — with Galileo among the first to be condemned by Catholic Church authorities for daring to question the “truth” of Earth’s place in the universe. No doubt if the SETI Institute or others one day truly tune into radio waves that scientists can confirm are coming from an extraterrestrial intelligent life form, that would have an impact on all religions, making us question even more whether we humans are as special as we think we are in the cosmos.
Telescopes over the centuries have helped us understand that the universe is a wondrous place. It is a vast place, and the farther we peer into the universe using these devices, the more humble we should feel living on our planet which is smaller than a speck of dust in comparison with the span of the cosmos.
