Cosmic Odyssey: How Intrepid Astronomers at Palomar Observatory Changed our View of the Universe

This is a marvelous book. In fact, I would venture to say it has become my most cherished book for a number of reasons: First, the book summarizes and explains the science performed over the past 7 decades by the famous California telescopes on Mt Wilson and Mt Palomar. Second because of the interesting level at which the book is written, and finally because of the wonderful graphics that are married to the book’s purpose. Let me expand on these.The 200-inch telescope came to first light in 1948 thanks to pioneering work by George Ellery Hale and funding from the Rockefeller and the Carnegie institutions. At the time, it was the largest telescope in the world and it soon became the most famous. Discoveries of great importance were made, and continued to be made with this instrument and its somewhat smaller sisters (the 100 inch and 60-inch telescopes on Mt Wilson).It is a somewhat difficult task to fully appreciate the science done with these instruments because it resides in two archival locations: in the original peer reviewed scientific literature in journals such as Astrophysical Journal and in various popular discussions, such as in Sky and Telescope, Scientific American and in newspapers reports. However, this book fills the gap between these sources. In a way it is the geometric mean between Sky and Telescope and the Astrophysical Journal. If you want a full and lucid account of the many science discoveries made, this is the book of choice.Finally, the graphics in the book are of especially high quality, filling a deficiency that we often see in the published literature. Often graphs are poorly executed and confusing. Not in this book. The author, working with her daughters have come up with beautiful easy to read graphics that served the purpose of the book superbly. There is also a strong connection between the book’s message and its design. It is, physically, a truly beautiful bookThe book covers the work, also, of the 48-inch Schmidt telescope on Palomar Mountain, an important instrument in itself which was used to do a wide-angle survey of the sky supported by the National Geographic Society. This camera took 14 by 14-inchhigh resolution glass plates of a six-degree wide fields. The accessible sky was photographed down to magnitude 20 with blue and red sensitive emulsions. These famous photographs were made available to astronomers all over the world and have been instrumental in locating interesting objects such as colliding galaxies etc that were then later photographed and studied more intensely with the larger instruments.Naturally, the book covers the work of Hubble,, Humason Zwicky, Baade and other early investigators who discovered the smudges on plates called nebula were in fact galaxies external to our own but at great distances and, moreover consisted mainly of dark matter invisible to the eye. But the observatories were famous for far more than these. Especially notable are the works of Allan Sandage and others who extrapolated the magnitude red-shift relations out to billions of parsecs to determine the Hubble Constant. And of course, quasars were discovered with these instruments by Maartin Schmidt in 1963 and, in association with supernovae were critical in extrapolating the largest distances in the universe and learning that the universe is accelerating.I found especially interesting the accounts of scientists, such as G. Neugebauer, James Gunn and James Westphal who built their own spectrographs and other scientific add-ons to the 200 inch telescope, often using optics obtained from C and H surplus in Pasadena or lenses ordered from the Edmund Scientific catalog, or testing early CCD’s being perfected by the Jet Propulsion laboratory.Many of the classifications of the stars by age along and away from the Main Sequence are discussed in this book, as well as cogent descriptions of the work that has led to the understanding of the evolution and interactions of dust, gas and particles within galaxies.Finally, one of the main attractions of this book is that the author personally interviewed many of the principals she writes about, often in multiple interviews. Schweizer captures the personality of these famous astronomers as well as clear descriptions of their accomplishments. I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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This book has a special personal connection to me as I have visited Palomar Observatory many times . I crossed paths with David Levy during his observing session and had the chance to converse with him. I was also at the observatory when Vera Rubin was imaging the Andromeda Galaxy for the purpose of confirming her theories regarding dark matter. This book has greatly expanded my knowledge of the ground breaking work performed at this iconic observatory spanning decades.

The Palomar Observatory has been an icon of astronomy since the early 1930s. The story of its creation as been told (see The Perfect Machine by Ronald Florence), but until now there has been no account that highlights the results of its scientific mission. Linda Schweizer's Cosmic Odyssey expertly recounts the tales of the astronomers who used the Palomar Observatory and revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

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