Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology (review)

Each age has had its iconic image of the astronomer, immediately recognizable and pervasive in even the popular culture of the time. Ours continues to be the eccentric individual, alone in a domed, mountaintop observatory, peering through his tube-and-glass telescope. However, as Patrick McCray shows us in this fine book, this paradigm is shifting, much to the scientific and technological betterment of the field, and as much to the professional angst of its practitioners. McCray marshals much of the narrative and analysis of professional historians who have studied recent astronomy and extensive new archival research and oral history, as well as some gems from the social studies of science and technology. His narrative flows from the Victorian reflecting giants of glass and steel to the perfection of the form in the Mount Palomar 200-inch telescope, the premature rumors of terrestrial astronomy's obsolescence in the face of space telescopes, and its perhaps surprising rebound in the past twenty years.

While McCray ably sets this story in a full historical context, it is primarily about the interactions of international science, technology, and politics in the design, development, and recent completion of a particular set of 8-meter telescopes, one in Hawaii and one in Chile, named "Gemini" after the constellation. This project, he writes, "is the history of recent astronomy in a microcosm" (p. 4). It is an appropriate choice, since these telescopes were conceived near the end of the cold war, when earth-based, observational optical astronomy was reinvigorated with new technologies and new sources of funding, and when its institutions and practices were changing rapidly. These developments perturbed what had been a traditional, rather stable division of labor between privately endowed observatories restricted to a small group of astronomers and government-funded national observatories. Further complications arose from the profusion of other, similar telescopes then being built by international consortia and ad hoc alliances of U.S. universities, as well as radio telescopes and space telescopes. Following Gemini's proponents as they navigate this technoscientific terrain is instructive, but equally significant is the brave new world of twenty-first-century astronomy implied by the collective development of many large and networked telescopes.

Isaac Newton's design for the reflecting telescope liberated astronomers from the difficulties of sending precious light through too much problematic glass. Individuals such as William Herschel and Lord Rosse created ever larger reflecting telescopes, huge contraptions of wood, glass, and metal that, under their sole and idiosyncratic control, allowed detailed study of planets, stars, and nebulae. Married to photography, spectroscopy, and then crude electronic detectors, such telescopes provided the signal means to study celestial objects. When the quest for ever larger apertures to collect light outstripped wealthy individuals' means, astute scientific entrepreneurs and discipline builders like George Ellery Hale appealed to a new generation of wealthy industrial capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and the philanthropic foundations they created.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, even in the clear Western skies of the United States, the time available on the few giant telescopes was a precious commodity. While government astronomers used smaller instruments, university astronomers did much of value with their local facilities, and theorists fed on the data when it was eventually made available, the few staff astronomers of these privately funded instruments were the envy of the rest of the United States and the world—for nowhere else did this pattern of scientific patronage develop. It was a system that worked: everybody knew his or her place, and instrumentation and scientific agendas were socially optimized in a meritocracy of sorts (some malcontent astronomers would, and did, say aristocracy). With it, a tiny group gave us the expanding universe of galaxies and the quantum physics of stars with the dim light that fell on those few and precious mirrors.

After World War II, massive infusions of military and civilian dollars attracted the astronomers who did not enjoy access to the few large telescopes...