Word: palomares
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only a blurred dot on a photographic plate. But as displayed last week by Astronomer Rudolph Minkowski of California's Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, it was a scientific milestone: the dot, probably the collision of two galaxies 6 billion light years away from earth, represented the most distant phenomenon ever identified...
...picture, taken by Minkowski with Palomar's giant 200-in. Hale telescope, was a dramatic symbol of a surge in astronomical science made possible by a far-sighted alliance between optical and radio telescopy. When Palomar's 200-incher was completed in 1948, no one expected it to photograph galaxies more than i billion light years away. A major reason: in such telescopes the field of view is very small, and to reach full range they must take long-exposure pictures of each tiny spot before moving on to the next. Thus, Palomar cannot range the heavens...
...years ago radio astronomers at the University of Cambridge reported waves from a dim radio star in the Bootes constellation. Radio astronomy was then too crude to give accurate directions-and when Minkowski tried to photograph the phenomenon with Palomar's telescope, he found nothing. But new radio telescopes at Cambridge and in Owens Valley, Calif, recently drew an accurate bead on the radio star in Bootes. Minkowski pointed the Palomar telescope at the spot indicated. And after exposing a photographic plate for two hours, he got his picture of two big galaxies in collision...
...list of good works is dizzying: the 200-in. Mount Palomar telescope, probing the lightyears; Nobel Prizewinner Niels Bohr's atomic research projects in Copenhagen; vast national parks-Wyoming's Jackson Hole, the Virgin Islands National Park, Maine's Acadia National Park; Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art; the site of the United Nations; the restored Reims Cathedral; and the rebuilt Stoa of Attalus in Athens. Colonial Williamsburg rose from the American past, and Rockefeller Center pointed to the American future (and changed the New York skyline). Schools, from Louvain to Tokyo and from Harvard...