1. In Richard Preston’s non-fiction book First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (1987, 1996), he concentrates on the use of the Hale Telescope to find quasars. The author first describes some of the pieces of technology that the team of astronomers add to the telescope by using their quotes and the details the astronomers offered, then he shows why Maarten Schmidt wanted to find quasars by giving background information on him, and to conclude he describes how the telescope works by explaining how it was developed and constructed using details that came from the woman who wrote George Ellery Hale’s biography and interviews and details with those who constructed the telescope. His purpose is to show how the science behind the search for quasars is really done in order to show that “science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.” He seems to have a scientific audience in mind because the book is about something that involves a lot of science and astronomy.
2. - quasars: a pointlike source of brilliant light of all colors. Quasars are very distant, primeval objects, deep in lookback time, near the limit of the visible universe. Thought to be a hot, burning core of a galaxy which contains a black hole at its center.
- lookback time: the amount of time it takes for light from an object to reach earth. Looking farther outward toward the sky is equivalent to looking backward in time, since the farther one sees outward, the more ancient the image one sees.
- Dark time: the moonless time of the month
- 4-shooter: electronic camera somewhat larger than a refrigerator, designed and built by James Gunn with a team of builders. The camera is installed at the bottom of the Hale Telescope.
- Redshift: reddening, or lengthening, of light waves emitted by an object that is receding from earth. Used as a gauge of relative distance to an object in the sky. The higher the redshift, the farther away the object is.
- Slew: to move a telescope very quickly across the sky
- Photons: waves and particles
3. Tone: Inquisitive
4. Rhetorical strategies:
5. Discussion Questions:
- If quasars are rarely seen, how do they know that an object is a quasar? How dod they know that quasars don't burn n the chemical or nuclear sense?
- Why does Richard Preston change from the team of astronomers working on "Big Eye" to the Shoemakers and their search for comets that may hit Earth?
- Why can't a telescope like Hale's Telescope be built in an are like today (or in the 1980s)? Does that mean that the search for quasars or the edge of the universe won't go any farther than Hale's Telescope allows?
6. “At the end of the sky lies the beginning.”
6. “At the end of the sky lies the beginning.”
