Lonely--but With Atmosphere

To gather starlight--the very point of living and working on this mountaintop--Theo ten Brummelaar and the other scientists must first get the mirrors right. After three years at historic Mt. Wilson Observatory, this is the last bit of work for the team from Georgia State University, building one of the most powerful telescope systems in the world. Now the team is racing to get the first two telescopes up and running in time for their official dedication, which is one week away. But there’s a glitch with the mirrors.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” deadpans Ten Brummelaar, a 38-year-old stellar astrophysicist.

Sometimes, he doesn’t leave this forest for days, immersed in a half-beloved, half-cursed astronomy subculture that is beginning to wane. Not many outsiders will notice or care about the slow shift in the way astronomy is practiced nowadays, often in warm offices via high-speed computer lines. But researchers who do travel to Mt. Wilson and other lonely observatories liken their journeys to time with a muse.

On this mountain--their home and office for long stretches--researchers say their work comes alive, even if they’re too busy on some nights to notice the stars mocking in midnight splendor. Far from city lights, in the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, they work amid live oaks and topless, lightning-zapped Jeffrey pines. The mountain is majestic with possibility and history. Albert Einstein visited once, refining his theory of relativity. Here, Edwin Hubble found that the Milky Way is not alone in the cosmos, forever displacing our galaxy from the center of the universe. In the last few years, Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes, 85, has made regular trips here, bunking down in quarters known as the Mt. Wilson Monastery.

These days, though, older observatories like 95-year-old Mt. Wilson don’t have the same mystical pull. Some astronomers, in fact, worry that the new generation of scientists won’t pine for peaks like the 5,800-foot Mt. Wilson. After all, no one really needs to touch a telescope or squint through an eyepiece at the sky anymore. Not when you can order up data from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope at no charge. Or sit in an office and control a telescope by remote. Or log on to a computer for real-time views of the stars.

“It takes away some of the romance of going to the mountaintop,” grumbles Ten Brummelaar. He knows graduate students in astronomy who do all their work by computer and can’t even point to the objects they’re studying in the sky.

On this evening, along with several other researchers on Mt. Wilson, the Georgia State team waits for darkness to shutter the mountain. Its members use flashlights on the concrete walkways, sometimes encountering a warmth-seeking rattlensake.

The forest glows red from special bulbs used to enhance night vision at the team’s white observatory domes, which dot the hillside like oversized R2D2s. From dusk until after midnight, Ten Brummelaar trudges in hiking boots between two of the 45-foot-high domes and the vast laboratory, where he dons surgical-type booties to work in a “clean” room the size of a football field. The team has an observatory for each of its six telescopes, which work together as one “array” run by Georgia State’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy, or CHARA. If the new mirrors are not aligned properly, the telescopes bounce starlight back to the laboratory--the first step in a complex process that makes the system work, notes CHARA director Hal McAlister, who dreamed up the project 20 years ago and has been living here with his wife for the past six months. Ten Brummelaar can’t figure out why the mirrors won’t stay still.

“This is disturbing,” he says at 10 p.m., eyes red after his third post-midnight shift in a row. “Things are moving around so much.”

Cutbacks, Time Pressures Keep Astronomers Put

In the old days, seasoned astronomers could tell you the best cowboy bar around Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz., or where to find a drink around the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in a dry Wisconsin county, laments Stephen Maran, spokesman for the American Astronomical Society. But the tradition of hitting the road is not much of a priority anymore, in part because of budget cutbacks and time pressures, says Maran, who’s also director of space science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

In New Mexico, at Apache Point Observatory, a major telescope run by the Astrophysical Research Consortium was the first to be designed and built specifically for remote use. That telescope, built in 1994, has been used by scientists from the South Pole and on aircraft. The consortium’s U.S. members save a total of more than $100,000 in travel costs by operating the telescope via computer commands over the Internet, says Gretchen Van Doren, an Apache Point spokeswoman.

In the Chilean Andes, Michigan State University and its partners are building a $43-million telescope that scientists will be able to control from the university’s East Lansing campus. And, in the next five years or so, the two Keck Telescopes of Hawaii--the largest of their kind in the world--will be adapted for remote use. That will deprive scientists of a trip to an observing site near the telescopes in Waimea, or to instruments themselves, at a mind-fuzzing 13,800-foot summit of the dormant Mauna Kea volcano.

But it’s a rite of passage to make such a journey, says astronomer Allan Sandage, 73, a former research assistant to Hubble, who used to spend 80 nights a year at Mt. Wilson’s Monastery. “There is a mystique about the place,” says Sandage, staff member emeritus at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena. “Everyone who ever worked there believed they were engaged in projects that were bigger than themselves, that were somehow fundamentally important to the human condition.”

Observatory Was Built Between 1904 and 1918

Mt. Wilson Observatory is a harrowing squiggle of a drive 45 minutes from Pasadena. It was built by the Carnegie Institution between 1904 and 1918, with mules and horses pulling telescope parts up the steep road. The observatory housed what were then the world’s largest telescopes. In those days, astronomers dined in suits and ties, with the researcher using the biggest telescope at the head of the table and those using smaller ones in descending order of size down the line.

In the late ‘30s, Mt. Wilson tugged at the imagination of people like Townes, then a Caltech graduate student. One night, Townes hiked up Mt. Wilson with his sleeping bag, just to watch the astronomers. Now he heads to Mt. Wilson every few weeks or so to work on a UC Berkeley telescope project, which focuses on the evolution of very old stars. He stays in the Monastery, so named because females were banned from the room until the 1960s.

“I like to participate. I think it’s fun. I like to be there. I like the science,” says Townes, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1964 for his role in the invention of the laser. Mt. Wilson, he says, “is a longtime friend of mine.”

Now, the nonprofit Mt. Wilson Institute manages the 40-acre spread under an agreement with the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

A Mess and Scorpions Up in the Monastery

On this afternoon, with about 15 researchers on the mountain, the Monastery is a mess. Unwashed dishes in the sink. An empty scotch bottle on a top kitchen shelf. A musty, dirty-socks kind of smell.

Regulars know to check their shoes for scorpions when they get up and keep an eye out for bobcats and mountain lions. Signs remind visitors to be quiet for the day sleepers. The ivy-covered building, with 15 dorm rooms and two bathrooms, is divided in half for day and night shifts. The 9-by-12-foot rooms, rented to researchers only for $12 a night, include bunk or twin beds. The Monastery ranges from half- to three-quarters full. There’s no cook, but Mt. Wilson’s groundskeepers look after the Monastery, bear-proofing trash cans and shoveling snow in the winter. They set traps for mice that chew through phone lines and electric wires.

Kind of a dream place, really, says Chad Ogden, 28, a Georgia State grad student. If his wife were not in Atlanta, he would have spent the summer here. Instead, he comes out every few months for a couple of weeks to join his school’s rotating 14-member team.

The hard part about staying here is the downtime, Ogden says. Without a rental car, which grad students can’t afford, they’re stuck on the mountain for long stretches. On most Friday nights, they catch a ride with someone headed to Lucky Baldwin’s bar in Pasadena, a local astronomer watering hole.

Otherwise, Ogden and other team members hike or hang out in the library room, where there’s a pool table. In a conference room, the reading material includes a March 1993 Sky & Telescope magazine and a 1932 “Catalogue of Double Stars.”

Even on nights off, researchers tend to hang out in the supreme darkness. Mt. Wilson is famous for its atmospheric steadiness. With stable, cool air from the Pacific, the observatory is perched high above the layer of smog and clouds that clamps down over the Los Angeles Basin. At sunset on Mt. Wilson, observers might see “a green flash,” an atmospheric quirk in which the top of the sun turns green for an instant.

While some researchers have TVs in their rooms, two months ago, Ogden and another graduate student dragged two padded office chairs to an observatory road for a different kind of show. They propped up their feet and snacked on root beers, chips and salsa. For three hours, they watched the long, glowing green streaks of the Perseid Meteor shower. The road outside Mt. Wilson’s private gates was crowded with people, their faces turned to the sky. They reminded Ogden why he’s here.

“It’s kind of cool that people from the city came up and went into the mountains to watch the meteors,” he says. “You get this feeling that there’s a whole population of people, and they’re all looking into the sky, going, ‘Come on. . . !’ ”

On most days, though, researchers don’t see anyone who’s not on their project team. The Georgia State team, for instance, might wrap up at dawn, just before the staff at UCLA’s 150-foot Solar Tower Telescope starts work. Solar observer Pam Gilman, 51, one of the few female residents on the mountain, has lived here for 14 years. She stays in a two-bedroom 1915 cottage with a picket fence. (Ten houses on the mountain are available to researchers for $125 to $200 a month.) She can’t imagine moving.

In San Gabriel, where Gilman grew up, she never saw colors the way she sees them here. Even though she grew up in the foothills, the mountains seemed so far away. Now, she studies changes in the sun on a mountain that is part of her own history. She collects old Mt. Wilson postcards. Her favorite is one of a female tourist in a long dress, riding side saddle on a mule up a steep, rugged road.

In her office is a bust of George Ellery Hale, the observatory’s founder, and pictures of other famous figures in astronomy.

“If they were to come back now,” Gilman says, “they would be so amazed and happy [at the work here]. It’s nice to be a part of it.”

Mirrors a Critical Part of ‘Interferometer’

Ten Brummelaar grew up near Sydney, watching the Apollo missions. He’s a fan of Deep Purple and Frank Zappa, a Levi’s and T-shirt kind of guy. A few times a year, though, he puts on a suit to talk to money guys about this $13.8-million project, including bigwigs from the National Science Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He’ll wear a suit in a few days for the VIP-heavy dedication ceremony. Now there’s this glitch with the mirrors.

The mirrors are a critical part of Georgia State’s “interferometer,” which combines light from two or more telescopes in a way that mimics the properties of a single, more powerful telescope. There are practical limits to how big a telescope can be, so scientists are turning to interferometers for unprecedented views of the stars. Georgia State’s array is expected toproduce images with details 200 times finer than the Hubble telescope’s. In the next few years, the array will be available to astronomy students and researchers through the Internet.

The university’s six telescopes will collect starlight and shoot it 600 feet through vacuum tubes to a laboratory. The trick is to bring the starlight from the different telescopes together at the same time and match the total distance each beam travels to within a millionth of an inch. The system’s new mirrors, so crucial, cannot vibrate or be misaligned, the way they are on Ten Brummelaar’s watch.

Even in crunch times, Ten Brummelaar is inspired by the history of Mt. Wilson and the presence of legends like Townes--without the laser, this project probably would not have been possible. For astronomers, interferometry began in 1919 with Albert A. Michelson’s first interferometer, built at Mt. Wilson and though no longer in use, still on the grounds.”It’s like a pilgrimage,” Ten Brummelaar says.

He has spent as many as 13 nights in a row on the mountain, away from his wife in Altadena, usually on a futon in the drafty loft of a colleague’s early 1900s cottage. On nights when Ten Brummelaar can’t see straight anymore, he and the others lapse into their “mechanical breakdown dance.” They dance around the telescopes and sort of hope that something breaks so they can stop working. Or their talk turns goofy--to topics like whether it would be wrong to replace the wooden toilet seats in one of the mountain cottages where Einstein reportedly stayed, and, well . . . the team finally decided that the mountain probably didn’t have indoor plumbing back then.

“We call it ‘mountain madness,’ ” Ten Brummelaar says. “You do get a bit nuts after a while, especially in the wintertime because the nights are so long.”

On this afternoon, the team begins hours of tedious work on the mirrors. Twice, though, Ten Brummelaar stops to remark on the deep tangerine-colored sunset. All night, they try to get a laser beam centered on the mirrors, which would indicate alignment. With the mirrors in place, they would be ready to find “fringes,” the term used to indicate that starlight from the telescopes is combining properly.

Ten Brummelaar fiddles with equipment in the laboratory, while other scientists work at the telescopes. “Right now, the pressure is pretty intense,” he notes, with funders and other guests due to arrive soon. “They want to see something happen.”

At 10:30 p.m., waiting for word from scientists at the telescopes, he sits cross-legged on the laboratory floor and starts to lie down. “I had better not get too comfortable,” he mutters and sits up.

The glitch turns out to be a minor one involving the mirrors’ bolts, easily fixed.

By midnight, Ten Brummelaar makes a last check of the telescope mirrors. The laser beam is roughly centered, maybe 4 millimeters off, or about the thickness of four dimes. Good enough. They’ll make final tweaks tomorrow. There is champagne in the refrigerator for possible celebrations (and 89-cent frozen dinners in the freezer for hunger emergencies). “Tomorrow,” Ten Brummelaar says, “we may be in fringe city.” Like that laser, he’s only a tad off. Five long nights later--and two days before the dedication ceremony--the team is in fringe city, with starlight in perfect and luminous combination.