David Schiminovich stared at a gallery of spiral galaxies as though he had never seen anything like them before. Indeed, no one had. He sat downloading the newly collected images in a narrow room overlooking a cavernous space at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In that space, the mirror for the Palomar Telescope—until the mid 1970s, the world’s largest telescope—had been polished nearly 6 decades ago.
Log in
Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.