Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Touring Mt. Wilson with George Ellery Hale's Descendants

Episode Date: July 15, 2013

On this special vacation edition of the show, we climb to the Mount Wilson Observatory to join a special tour for the descendants of the facility’s fascinating founder, George Ellery Hale.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the Hale family reuniting itself with their roots, with George L. Ray Hale. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. And this week, back in history, to what may be the most important astronomical observatory in human history. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with a special edition of Planetary Radio as I recover from a brief vacation. Bill Nye and Emily Lakawala have the week off, but Bruce Betts will be here for a brand new What's Up segment shortly. First, though, I want to share with you a few minutes from a video documentary I'm working on.

I couldn't believe my good fortune a few months ago when I was invited to accompany members of the Hale family on a tour of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Our tour guide on that cold, cold day high above Southern California's San Gabriel Valley was Dave Jarasevich, the observatory's superintendent. Dave first brought our little group into a small room at the base

of a tremendous tower that could be seen from the valley more than a mile below us. So this is the 150 foot solar tower. Before we get into talking about how this thing works, I want to talk a little bit about George L. Retail, a lot about what he did scientifically. He was born in Chicago in 1868, three years before Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked the lantern over and caused the Great Fire of Chicago. He was born into a family that became a very prominent industrialist family in the city of Chicago. His father, William E. Hale, was in the elevator business when

Chicago was putting up multi-story buildings after the Great Fire. And I believe Chicago was even preceded New York in putting up what we now call skyscrapers. So the elevator business was being in the right place at the right time. If you've been to Paris, France, you've been in a Hale elevator because that's what takes you to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Hale grew up in Chicago and went to college at MIT for four years, got his bachelor's degree in physics, graduated in 1890, and married. He never went to finish a master's or a PhD, although he did start a PhD program in Berlin, Germany. He was too busy. He had too many big plans to create. And so he only got that bachelor's degree.

In his lifetime, and by lifetime I mean his productive lifetime, which was a span of about 40 years from after he graduated from MIT until he basically became a recluse in the Hale Solar Lab in Pasadena because of mental afflictions. He did a lot of really wonderful things. More than one man should be able to do in three lifetimes. He founded the three greatest observatories in the world during his life. In 1897, he founded the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, with a 40-inch lens-type telescope, still the largest lens-type telescope in the world today.

Well, he found out that Wisconsin was not necessarily the best place to do astronomy. You know, it's cold, it snows a lot. And so he came out west in 1903 because he had heard about Wilson's Peak, the mountain that we're on, named for Don Benito Wilson, the first mayor of Los Angeles, who blazed a trail up this mountain looking for wood for his wine barrels. In 1903-1904 time period, Hale put in approximately $30,000 of his own money to start establishing the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory here on Mount Wilson. In 1904, Andrew Carnegie started kicking in the rest of the money to build this facility. So this was the second observatory that Hale completed.

1904 was the beginning of this observatory. Before he passed away in 1938, and two days ago was the 75th anniversary of his death in Pasadena, he set the wheels in motion for the 200-inch telescope at Palomar. He did not live to see it completed. He died 10 years before its commissioning. If you go down to Palomar today and walk in that dome, the first thing you see is a bronze bust of this man, George Ellery Hale. And in honor of him and the great accomplishments that he made, that telescope is named the Hale Telescope today.

If that wasn't enough in one lifetime, this guy also is basically the man who resurrected the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., formed the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., to help support the war effort from a scientific standpoint, World War I. He is responsible for the beautiful architecture you see in Pasadena, the city hall, the civic center, the library. He was on the Architectural Planning Commission, pushed a lot of that through. Pretty amazing for a man who had a series of nervous breakdowns and disorders that kept him out of the public for long periods of time.

Now back to Mount Wilson. When he came here, he was interested in a field of astronomy called stellar evolution. He wanted to know how these stars in the sky that we see are born, how they live, and how they die. And stars are just like people. They're born in all different sizes and shapes and weights. They live lives differently, and they pass away differently. So what better star to study than the closest star to us, the sun? That's where Hale put his effort at first.

He built three solar telescopes here on Mount Wilson, and in 1905, a horizontal one, and then in 1908, a 60-foot tower with a set of mirrors on the top, and in 1912, he completed this 150-foot solar tower here. And in the course of studying the sun, he made a couple of great discoveries. Number one, he found out that the sun has magnetic fields on it. Prior to that, we only knew of magnetic fields

on one celestial body. It's called the Earth. Hale showed that the sun in sunspots had magnetic fields in them. And in the 1920s, using this telescope here, he showed that the 11-year sunspot cycle that we normally know, where it goes from minimum sunspots to maximum, back down to minimum, actually has another 11-year component.

And every 22 years, or 11 years actually, in the cycle, the north and south poles of the sun reverse in polarity. Hale discovered that here, along with one of his colleagues, Seth Nicholson. Those were two fundamental discoveries. Once he had enough data on the sun, he started expanding his reach to more distant stars in our galaxy and deeper into the universe. And those are facilities we're going to see later. Those are nighttime telescopes, big reflecting telescopes. But this is where he did a lot of his work, in here. This tower is 150, actually about 170 feet tall, and it's got two mirrors that one tracks the sun and reflects the light into a second mirror that brings it down the long vertical shaft that you may have seen when you were walking outside. It's in the center of the tower.

It comes down here. It passes through a little tiny opening or an aperture, and it goes 80 feet directly below our feet here into the ground. This is an 80-foot pit that was dug by hard rock miners. And at the bottom is a special device like a prism, it's called a diffraction grating, that spreads the sun into the colors of the rainbow. And in those colors are lines. And if you know how to decipher those lines, like an Egyptologist deciphers hieroglyphics, it tells you a lot about what you're looking at. Hale

studied those lines and learned a lot of fundamental properties of the Sun. And that was all done in here. Today this telescope is used every clear day by UCLA, who leases this scope from Mount Wilson Institute, to study the magnetic fields of the sun. And every clear day since about 1917, one of the first things that the observer does when he gets here in the morning, after he goes up the tower to set all the mirrors up, is he puts a piece of paper down right here at this level and with lead pencils he sketches every sun

spot on the Sun by hand and then he records its location and measures this magnetic intensity now we don't have to do that anymore we have things called digital cameras that can take care of that. But that's not how it's done at Mount Wilson. Because here, it's tradition. So we have these drawings hand-drawn back to 1917. It's the longest recorded history of the sun at any observatory on Earth. And basically what we get from all that data is right here. You see these drawings.

These are disks of the sun, and these black and these white marks, smudges, are actually areas of sunspots and solar activity. And you can see, if you follow this along, you can see that the sun is rotating. You can see this spot getting further and further across the sun. So these are daily observations. That's Dave Juracevich, superintendent of the Mount Wilson Observatory.

When we return, Dave will take the descendants of George Ellery Hale and our microphone into the dome where the great 100-inch telescope still looks up at the night sky. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together we can advocate for planetary science and dare I say it, change the worlds.

Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio.

I'm Matt Kaplan. On this special vacation edition of our show, I'm sharing some of the tour provided to the descendants of the great astronomer and promoter of science, George Ellery Hale. We're high above Southern California's San Gabriel Valley at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where GEH built the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, along with several other historic instruments. Our guide once again is Dave Juracevich, astronomer and superintendent of the observatory. First of all, I want to ask you, how many of you have been to Europe or to England and have been in a cathedral or an abbey? Yeah, probably most.

Those are magnificent medieval and Gothic monuments built by man to honor God, to honor religion. You're standing in the 20th century cathedral to modern astronomy. standing in the 20th century cathedral to modern astronomy. What was done in here forever put us in our place in the universe. This is where the fundamental underpinnings of modern cosmology were laid. The men last year, the three physicists who won the Nobel Prize for physics, who learned and discovered that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating, stood on the shoulders of the men who worked in here, Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason. This is where we finally found out how we fit into the universe. And they used this telescope, the largest in the world, to do it.

This blue tube that you see here is 40 feet tall and it's surrounded by this gray box that has all these hot rivets on it. This was all built in a shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts called the Four River Shipyard during World War I. They were building battleships at the time. That's battleship construction right there. All the hot rivets. Look at all the hot rivets on the wall behind you. The entire dome is hot riveted. It's not bolted. This 100-ton telescope has to be supported, again, very accurately

on bearing surfaces so that it doesn't jump and jerk. The technology was so successful at the 60-inch that they transferred it to the 100-inch. Inside that container and inside a container at the top of what we call the North Pier are two Mercury floats. 95 tons of this 100- ton telescope are floating on Mercury. This is the biggest Swiss watch on Mount Wilson. Hale went back to San Gobeil when he needed this glass mirror blank poured because they did a good job on the 60 inch. They had been in business for a long time, since I think the 14 or 1500s. They had poured every piece of glass for every mirror in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace

of Versailles. So they knew what they were doing. And they used the latest technology at the time, which was a plate glass. Pyrex didn't exist. Corning was not even thought of at that time. The bottom line is, the French tried either seven or eight times to make this mirror blank. I have the records from San Gilbane, and they're kind of fuzzy on the one attempt, but we know at least seven attempts. And they were only successful one time to pour it. That's the mirror that's in here today. The first two times they tried to pour it. That's the mirror that's in here today. The first two times they tried

to pour it, they cooled it too quickly or they had problems with the mirror mold and it cracked. The third time, they were successful. They put it in a box and they shipped it across the ocean to Hoboken, New Jersey, transferred to New Orleans, and then brought across the country by rail to Pasadena, arriving on the same night that Hale and Ritchie were first pointing the 60-inch to the night sky for the first time. The next day, Hale and Ritchie went down the trail to Pasadena. They opened the crate, and they just about had heart attacks. Because what they saw was a piece of glass with literally thousands of bubbles in it.

And when they looked at its side, it looked like a three-layer cake. Because the French didn't have a ladle big enough to pour it in one setting. They had to go back to the oven three times. And each time they did, the previous layer cooled just a tiny bit so that there's a definite mark. They said this will never work. Because when we put this beautiful surface into the mirror, put it in the telescope,

and the telescope is leaned over to look at an object, all those bubbles are going to make this glass non-homogeneous. It's going to shift that beautiful shape, and it's going to lose focus. So they had the French try four more times. And they were never successful except for one time, when they poured a piece of glass that big, but only eight inches thick. Not thick enough to support this surface. That glass blank is still in the factory in Paris today. I'd love to get that blank over

here. So this is what they had to work with, and this is what really drove George Ellery Hale almost to the brink of madness, because he knew he had to make this work. And his optician Ritchie said, it'll never work. George Ritchie spent about six to six and a half years grinding and polishing and figuring this mirror to perfection. And it was brought up on July 1st, 1917, and then put in the telescope shortly thereafter. On the very first night, they pointed it to an object in the night sky

and we have the record of that. And whoever wrote it down wrote the wrong object because we looked in planetarium software that you can buy for a computer and that object was below the horizon at that time on that day. But nevertheless, they were looking at an object, either a planet or a star. And when George Hale went up the ladder to the eyepiece and he looked through it, he was absolutely depressed, because what he saw was multiple images of that object.

And I'm sure when he got down the ladder, George Ritchie, his optician, who he forced to make the mirror, told him, I told you so. This was never going to work. Turns out that during the day, one of the workmen left the shutter over there open slightly, and the sun had warmed up the glass of the mirror, and it warped it. That's why they saw multiple images. They retired down to the monastery to try to sleep, and your grandfather didn't sleep. He must have been as nervous as could be. And they came back early in the morning, and they pointed it to another object,

and when they looked through the eyep they pointed it to another object and when they looked through the eyepiece it was perfect. Dave Jarasiewicz of the Mount Wilson Observatory providing a magnificent tour for the descendants of George Ellery Hale, the man who built the observatory and possibly the 20th century's greatest advocate for science. These tour excerpts are taken from the video I shot on that cold day. I hope to complete my documentary about that visit soon, and you can bet that I'll let you know how you can see it. But why not visit Mount Wilson yourself? You can learn how at mtwilson.edu. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts.

Bruce Betts. Yes, it is a special vacation edition of Planetary Radio, but nevertheless, we wouldn't leave you without a what's up to tell you what's happening in the night sky, a visit with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Got some good stuff this week? Lots of good stuff, Matt. Welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. It was a really nice trip. All right. There's good stuff in the night sky.

I don't know if you saw it on your travels, but Venus still looking stunning over in the low in the west shortly after sunset, looking like a super bright star. Got Saturn in the south looking yellowish. It's playing with the moon if you get this soon after it comes out. So on the 16th, it's fairly near the moon. But in any case, it's hanging out in the south. And for you crazy pre-dawn people, crazy, crazy pre-dawn people, there are awesome planets firing up in the pre-dawn. We've got Jupiter looking super bright right above Jupiter as we release this as Mars looking much dimmer and reddish. Those two are going to grow closer together over the next few days. And coming up in the next several days to next week or two, Mercury will be down below them.

So we'll have certainly another week we'll have three good planets in the pre-dawn east as well. Speaking of beautiful skies, we were up in the Sonora area, California's gold country, specifically Twain Heart. There were spectacular skies, not quite as good as the Chilean desert, but really beautiful skies. Well, if you're going to keep comparing to the Chilean desert. The Atacama? I had to drop the Atacama again. And every chance I get. We move on to this week in space history.

It was Apollo 11 week. So Apollo 11 launched and landed first humans on the moon this week in 1969. It excites Matt every single time just thinking about it. And 1969 excites Matt every single time just thinking about it. Congratulations once again to Buzz and Mike. We will not forget you or Neil. And for you, Matt, I've got more Apollo 11 goodness coming up, including in... Thank you.

Now I'm at home again. Welcome home. This is one of those that's kind of obvious if you count them up, but it still just struck me as kind of amazing. Apollo 11 was only the fifth human mission in the Apollo program. It's like, eh, we've done four. Sure, let's go to the surface. Try out those spindly legs.

I don't know. It was all very methodical, but there certainly wasn't a lot of pad in the process. No, no. All right, we go on to the trivia contest, and we're going to step away from Apollo 11 for a moment. Far away. I asked you, besides the five spacecraft on escape trajectories from our solar system, what is the farthest intact, as in not vaporized spacecraft right now in 2013? How'd we do? Everybody who understood, who picked up the caveat,

got this right. But there were a number of people who missed your little warning that we were not interested in the five spacecraft that are headed out of the solar system. So we got Voyager, we got Pioneer, we got New Horizons. Sorry, folks, we did eliminate those. Everybody else did get it right. Now, as you will hear, there was some disagreement over the optional second place, second farthest.

I did say for bonus praise, what is the second farthest? That one's trickier. I'm going to read you this first one who is not the winner, but I just like his special greeting, his special message to us. Love the show. Just started listening and have just got a telescope to check out

what you guys are talking about. This is from Craig Clissold down there in Australia, down under. Bruce, he adds, just started watching your, and I think this is on purpose, SciChicks it's really physics, 135 course, your Intro to Astronomy course on YouTube. He's loving it.

Keep up the good work. So congrats. Yes, check out SciChicks 195. It's known as Physics 195, Introduction to Astronomy and Planetary Science. You can go to planetary.org slash Betts class and check out the whole archive from the Springs, California State University, Dominguez Hills class. Do you plan to teach the SciChicks course as well? Because I really want to sign up for that one.

If anyone will let me. All right. So there's no doubt. Craig, welcome. Thank you for listening. And we're glad you're loving this stuff. By the way, it was your countryman who won this week, was chosen by Random.org, and that would be Warwick Hook.

Warwick Hook of Wynmalee, I hope I have that right, Australia, who said the most distant spacecraft not on escape trajectory is Cassini. Correct? It is indeed. Cassini orbiting Saturn. Excellent. Well, Warwick, we're going to send you that brand new Planetary Radio t-shirt 2.0. He did take a shot at the second most distant, and he said he thinks it's Ulysses, no longer operational, but it is intact, which was your requirement. Ilya Schwartz, he said in a few years it will be Juno near Jupiter. But right now he thinks it's dawn on its way to that biggest of asteroids, Ceres.

What are your comments? Well, I think it's yet another spacecraft. So I'm embarrassed because I didn't have time to deal with this once you told me about it. I'm going to have to come back next week with a definitive answer. My impression, Ulysses really threw me because I did say intact I wasn't thinking of defunct, but indeed, Ulysses has a long orbit. I'll have to figure out where it was in it. But Rosetta, European Space Agency Rosetta, headed for a comet rendezvous next year, been traveling for many years, is actually hanging out

towards the Jupiter orbit. So I'm pretty sure it's out past dawn, which is, of course, hanging out in the asteroid belt. But I will sort all of this out and feel free to hammer me with the correct answer in the meantime and abuse me for not being sure. So tune in again next week, space fans, space cadets, and you'll get the definitive answer. Yes, I just meant this as a cliffhanger. It was a very clever plan. It's such a tease. We also have this preview for next week's question, which is our one about doggies in space, you know, animals, dogs

in space. It's not the answer to the question that you asked, but Stephen Witte did come up with this, because we were talking about Pluto the dog, and he says, you may think he's two-dimensional, but Pluto is a real, spelled R-E-E-L dog. Ah!

Okay. So now you can give us a question for next time. Back to Apollo 11. On Apollo 11, how long, reasonably accurately, how long were Armstrong and Aldrin separated from the command module? In other words, in sloppier lingo, how long was their jaunt down to the moon's surface and back? I like it.

And you have until the 22nd of July to enter this. That would be Monday, the July 22nd at 2 p.m. Pacific time. How do they enter, Bruce? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Anything else you want to jump in with here? I do. Thanks for the pitch. Yes, social media, Matt. I did something

during this last week while you were gone. Did you clean it up? Without their permission. Okay. What'd you do? No, I've left a big mess. I heard about this newfangled thing called Facebook. It's very popular with the kids. So I've created a personal profile. But more significantly to listeners of this show, I've created a Facebook page.

So you can find that at Facebook.com slash Dr. Bruce Betts, D-R, no periods, D-R Bruce Betts, or you can search for me and find another way to get stuff. Of course, there's still at Random Space Fact on Twitter. Also, I'm hanging out on Google Plus, who like that, over at Bruce Betts, oddly enough, on Google Plus. And we'll be trying to pump out information through all those things, including random space fags, easy things to look for in the night sky, strange pictures of Matt, stuff like that. And Matt, you're hanging out

at Plan Rad on Twitter, at least. Correct. Good night. Thank you. Everyone go out there, look up the night sky, and think about why some superheroes wear capes. Thank you, and good night. Here's my theory. It's that Kal-El really never got along without his baby blanket.

So Mom Kent just sewed it into the suit. That's nice. I like that. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. And we'll be back next week when we get back to our regular format. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.