Scope Creep

Renee: I was promised a comet. I want that on the record before we do anything else. I have been disappointed more than once. And let me tell you, okay, so Gina, the best friend from those days, she and I were in Vegas. We took a cab to dinner. I don't remember where, but we took a cab. Because this is the time where, you know, you parked the car once and you just didn't want to see it again. Right. And the cab driver told us, oh, we should head to this secluded mountain to watch the meteor shower that was happening like during that week. And we're like, OK, OK, because we really wanted to go. But we eventually talked ourselves into the idea that this guy was a serial killer and that we were going to go to some random mountain somewhere and see nothing and that he was going to show up and kill us. And so we were like, OK, we're not going. And then we thought about it some more. We're like, you know what? Seriously, his seat was pulled up really far. He was probably pretty short. So if he did show up, Gina could take him. So we're like, you know what? Forget it. We won't get out of the car. We'll open the moonroof. Whatever we see, we see. We'll make sure the doors are locked. Perfect. Right? Perfect. There were 200 other cars there, Mark. They were coming like every five minutes. Your eyes could never get readjusted. And so there was no point in being there. So like, yeah, it never even got dark. It was totally and absolutely lame. Yeah.

Marc: And you've held that against the entire field of astronomy for years now.

Renee: Yes, I do. Okay, remember that time we went to the housing complex? Okay, so out by you, near Magic Mountain. Like if you went farther up the road, past where people store their RVs, which people still store their RVs there, by the way.

Marc: I'm sure they do. That hasn't turned into anything else. That hasn't changed anything.

Renee: It's still there. And then up back behind there was dirt roads because they hadn't built anything yet, but they were going to build houses up there. I can't imagine how windy that is up there, but they were going to build that. So we decided that, okay, we were far enough away that we wouldn't get the light pollution from Six Flags Magic Mountains. We were like, okay, so we're behind a couple mountains. We were like, all right, fine. Did we pile into Ryan's truck? Isn't that what we did?

Marc: I think, I can't remember. Or did we take more than one car? I think we took more than one car that one time. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Because I remember Ryan being there.

Renee: I remember Ryan being there. Anyway.

Marc: We did it more than once, but I do remember that one time that we, because you guys had like that, I don't know if it was that Lexus or the little bands or something. We definitely took two cars once. I remember that.

Renee: Yeah, we might have had the two-seater. You know, it's that whole like, it got us on the whole like, it doesn't fit the kids. Like, that's the point. Like, that's damn straight. Yeah. I got a roadster. All right. Anyway, so we saw meteors and I think we had a telescope and we were looking at a nebula and they were smudges. It was a smudge. A faint gray smudge. That was Halley's Comet in 1986, and it was the least favorable pass for anyone watching from Earth on record. I've seen more dramatic length, and yes, I have held that against the entire field of astronomy for 40 years.

Marc: I do remember that time we went up there, and I had a nice scope. I think it was like an 8-inch smit casagrain or something. And, you know, they get more advanced all the time, right? And this one had tracking and stuff, and you used a little pointer on the stars.

Renee: You typed in the coordinates. Yeah, and you do the whole thing. And it pointed it right where you're supposed to,

Marc: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it was pretty good, but you're right. It was like, oh, look, here's the greater Magellanic cloud, or here's the whatever. This nebula or whatever. And, you know, it's just a, yeah, it's just a smudge. And you feel like.

Renee: Get your head out of the way. Like, that's what it looked like. It looked like someone's head was in the way. Yeah, right? I mean, occasionally, you would look at something like, I don't know, Jupiter, and maybe, maybe you could see stripes, but you won't see that great red eye or anything. You might say, that's a striped planet. And maybe you would look at Saturn, and it would look kind of triangular because of the rings. but you never got it.

Marc: You could see rings pretty good.

Renee: Mine, I could not see the gap for sure.

Marc: Yeah, mine was fine. You could definitely.

Renee: Like, I couldn't see the Cassini gap. Could have been that good.

Marc: Yeah, I could see the gap. I could see the gap for sure. I have seen the red dot out of mine, but it's a little tough, you know. But you definitely, I could see all the Jovian moons and stuff. Yeah, that's not a problem. But yeah, I like, my favorites are like the Ring Nebula. I like the Ring Nebula. That's one of my favorites. And then, obviously, the Orion Nebula and the pillars and all that stuff. I love that. That's, you know, that's fun. Anyways, yeah.

Renee: I, we'll talk about it in a minute. Anyway, we should talk about telescopes and how amazing it is that non-scientists not only have access to amazing telescope technology. I mean, if I had 7K to blow on a scope, it'd be solar. I want to stare at the sun for hours. I'd buy a solar. If I just had money, Renee would have a collection of solar telescopes all pointed at the sky during the day. That's what I want. Anyway, welcome to another episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we talk about technology, past, present, and future. I'm Renee, and it turns out 40 years of smudge grudge is a technology story. Today on the show, the telescope, 400 years of people looking at the sky and then being disappointed and then going off to grind glass until they weren't.

Marc: Like, that's what you go do. And I'm Mark. Later, we will debate who loves telescopes more. You know, no secret, it's me.

Renee: It's okay. So let me set the table because I have a claim. People think the history of the telescope is a story about astronomy. It isn't. It's a story about manufacturing. Every time we could suddenly see something we couldn't see before, it came from somebody solving a problem with glass or metal or casting or film or eventually a chip. The sky was always up there doing its thing, right? The bottleneck was the stuff we could make.

Marc: Yeah, I'll agree with that, and I'll add one piece on the physics that explains why everybody was so obsessed with size. A telescope is a bucket for light, and the area of the circle goes up with the square of the diameter, the geometry. Double the width of your lens or mirror, and you collect four times the light. Triple it, and you collect nine. The opening also sets how much fine detail you can resolve, so bigger gets you fainter objects and sharper pictures at the same time.

Renee: That makes the whole 400-year history of people shouting bigger and glass people saying no. There's a second idea. The one that makes this a show and not a trade magazine, a telescope is a time machine. Light has speed, so looking farther means looking earlier. And in a better telescope, it takes you farther back until you're looking at the universe as a baby, a baby. Nobody in 1608 knew that was coming. They thought, they thought, they were building something to spot ships.

Marc: Yeah, so it was a military gadget first. Hans Leperche demonstrated it for Prince Maurice in late September of 1608, and Maurice was in the middle of a long war with Spain. So being able to spot troops and ships early was exactly the pitch. Like, yeah, you could see that going on like the shark tank or whatever, you know. Right. Like, look at this.

Renee: I can see them coming far away. You're like, I don't know. It looks like a smudge to me. Are you sure it's the Armada?

Marc: Is that a ship? Is that a ship? It's just blurry. Yeah. Nobody was thinking about Jupiter then.

Renee: So the Netherlands, 1608, Schifferche, a German-born spectacle maker in the town of Middleburg, put two lenses in a tube and makes faraway things look cloaks. He calls it A caker. Oh, which is Dutch for... Oh, I might have got... If you speak Dutch, let me know. I might have got that right. Mind you, I have a friend who moved to the Netherlands the next year she filed her taxes in Dutch. I am not her.

Marc: Just so we're clear. Oh, that would be rough.

Renee: Yeah. It's Dutch for looker. Not celestial instrument, looker. On October 2nd, he walks into the States General in The Hague and asks for a 30-year patent. And they say no, because they decide the thing's too easy to copy to be worth protecting. Oh, look at the patent people coming through. They did pay him to build a few of them, though, including binocular versions. About 900 guilders in all. So the first telescope patent fight ends with nobody getting a patent.

Marc: Hey, no, it's not worth a patent, but hey, can you build us some of these things? Can you build some of those?

Renee: Because that's pretty rad.

Marc: That's pretty cool. It's not novel.

Renee: I mean, you may as well make the money. We're going to do it anyway, but you may as well make the money. That's how I just sold it to him.

Marc: A couple of weeks after Lippertscher's application of second Dutchman, of course, you know, it's like, you know, Jacob Medias filed his own and Zacharias Janssen, I guess it's Janssen, and turns up in the folklore with a shaky claim of his own. There's lots of patents, you know, claims here. The secret was out, and within months you could buy these in Paris. The design was simple. A convex lens at the front, that's called the objective lens, gathers light and bends it towards a focus. A concave lens at the eyepiece catches the converging light before it focuses and spreads it back out. So your eye sees a magnified, upright image. Those Dutch scopes were about three power, enough to read a sign across a field and nowhere near enough to make out a crater on the moon. I don't know, three power, you could probably still make out tiny, you know, like the big details. I don't know.

Renee: Maybe, you know what, not on a full moon,

Marc: But maybe on a... Yeah, at the edge there. Then Galileo hears about it in the spring of 1609, and without ever seeing when he works out how to build his own, he taught himself to grind and polish, and his instruments got to eight power, then 20.

Renee: The popular stories is Galileo invented the telescope. He used the telescope as a career move. August 1609, he hauls his eight-power scope up the bell tower of St. Mark's with the senators of Venice, and they can see ships out on the water hours before anyone else can see them with the naked eye. For a maritime republic, that's a weapon. He hands it over, and the Senate gives him a lifetime appointment and a fat raise. He sold it to the Navy, basically. And then he took the 20 power version home and pointed it at the sky.

Marc: There's a great book, Galileo's Daughter, if you're interested, about later in his life when he's locked up. But it does go into a lot of the science here. It's really good. He wasn't even the first looking at the sky, though. An Englishman named Thomas Harriot drew the moon with his sixth periscope in the summer of 1609, months before Galileo. But Galileo kept going. In January 1610, he turns it on Jupiter and sees three little points, you know, three little moons of light over the next few nights, and they move, and then there's a fourth, four moons orbiting another planet. He publishes it that March as the Starry Messenger. And the catch is the design. Galileo's lens arrangement had a tiny field of view. At 20 power, you could only see about a quarter of the moon at once, like looking through a keyhole. A few years later, Kepler worked out on paper that two convex lenses would give a much wider field and more magnification with one price. The image comes out upside down.

Renee: And astronomers were like, fine, because the stars don't have a right side up. I'd like to meet the person who looked at an upside down moon and thought, oh, that's not right. Yeah. That's wrong. Like, it's round. Like, what is upside down, right? Now, a quick note on Galileo. Wait, go ahead. What?

Marc: Yeah, it is, like, because it's upside down, though, like, left is right up, right is left, up is down, up is down.

Renee: Yeah, that's fair.

Marc: Like, when you're trying to, like, you're trying to find something, I always mess up and you hit the button, you know, on the thing to search and move it. Yeah. Anyways.

Renee: That's fair.

Marc: First world problems.

Renee: Yeah, right. Right. Now, a quick note on Galileo, though, because the popular version has him a martyr to the church full of idiots. And it's, you know, it's a little messier than that, because isn't history always just a tiny bit messier than how you're taught it, right? In 1632, he writes a book comparing two models of the universe, and the character defending the old Earth-centered view is named Simplicico, roughly simpleton, right? The Pope had personally asked Galileo to treat that view fairly. So the man famous for being right took the one guy who could protect him and had a character called Simpleton recite the Pope's arguments.

Marc: What? That's pretty aggressive, right? I mean. What? I know. I don't know. I don't know. That's a little, I think, I don't know.

Renee: He makes a fight with the Pope by calling him dumb and telling him to stay in his lane. I wonder who would do that.

Marc: Dalai, obviously.

Renee: Obviously. Yeah, I had never heard that until we did this research that like, you know, he writes the books of the two universes. I didn't know the Pope sat him down and said, listen, don't be a jerk about this. Like, you discover something good for you, but let's not undo all this history in the name of your scientific whatever. These aren't the same things. Faith and science aren't the same things, right? But he couldn't help himself because he's Galileo. By the way, can I tell you, I was at the Science and Technology Museum in Florence, Italy.

Marc: I love that one. Yeah, I agree with that.

Renee: It's Renaissance science, though. So all the models are the earth is in the middle and everything goes around them. So to just to see how much they dedicated to the idea, like working metal models of this is how the earth is in the middle and everything moves around it. Like to see that stuff is pretty amazing. That and breached bursts in wax. That was creepy. I don't know.

Marc: Oh, yeah, that is creepy. Yeah. It was gross. It was good. I love that museum, though. The, you know, he should have been, he should have been a little more careful, right? Because, because the church sponsored and paid for a lot of scientific and mathematical research at the time, like, probably the majority. So, yeah, anyways, all right.

Renee: It kind of feels like, oh, you're all going to lose your jobs, but we'll give you an income and you can go do whatever you want. People talk like that, and this is what they get, right, I guess. History's full of these guys.

Marc: Anyways, Kepler, his design wins and holds for a century, which sets up the first big problem. When light goes through glass, it bends, and different colors bend by different amounts. It's blue more than red. A simple lens can't bring all the colors to one focus. You get a blurry image wrapped in colored halos. Worse at higher magnification. It's called chromatic aberration, and you can't grind it away.

Renee: So by the middle of the 1600s, you have astronomers with gorgeous new instruments and a rainbow problem. You can make the lens bigger or the magnification higher without the image falling apart into soup. And what these brilliant, obsessive people do about it is the funniest engineering decision in the history of science. What do they do, Renee? They made them longer, like absurdly longer. If you can't fix the lens, you stretch the focal length until the colors barely have room to disagree. By around 1670, you've got Johann Hevelis in Danzig with a telescope 150 feet long. And Christian Huygens building what are called aerial telescopes, which had no tubes at all. The lens sat on top of a pole or a mast, and you stood on the ground holding the eyepiece and a taut string connected the two so you could keep them lined up. This is Europe's finest minds in the Enlightenment, outdoors at night, holding a string that runs at 100 feet up to a lens, trying to find Saturn. At some point, someone should have had the sense to say, like, I don't know, this seems like a lot of string. It's a lot.

Marc: It's gotta be it's gotta be fraught with you know just all sorts of failure domains right you know like.

Renee: We heard the success not everything that failed to get them to one super long

Marc: Tube yeah really long.

Renee: String like we didn't hear all the stuff that went wrong that's how history

Marc: Works yeah it did work though like it did sort of work the longer the focal length the longer the focal length compared to the width of the lens, the less the rainbow error matters. But the slightest breeze in your telescope was a kite.

Renee: There it is.

Marc: Yeah. The real fix came from Newton, who had split white light with prisms in the 1660s and understood the color problem better than anyone alive. He decided lenses couldn't be fixed, so he skipped them. A curved mirror bounces every color at the same angle, so there's no chromatic aberration at all. In 1668, he built a little reflecting telescope, a tube about six inches long with a mirror an inch and a third wide, magnifying it around 40 times. The Royal Society loved it. You know, they loved everything Newton did. The trouble was the mirror material. These early mirrors were speculum metal, a copper and tin alloy ground by hand. It reflected maybe two-thirds of the light. It was copper and tin, so it tarnished. And every time you repolished it, you risk ruining the shape that has to be right to a tiny fraction of a wavelength of light.

Renee: So Newton was wrong about lenses. He declared the color problem unsolvable. Way to win. Can't fix it. Don't know. And because he was Isaac Newton, nobody bothered to check for about 50 years. In 1730s, a lawyer named Chester Moore Hall figured out you could cancel most of the color by pairing two kinds of glass, crown and flint. And he told almost nobody, because that's helpful. John Dolan reinvented it in the 1750s, patented it, and collected the reputation. And yes, there was a patent fight, because there's always a patent fight. But meanwhile, the mirror camp had the best amateur in science history, William Herschel. To cast and polish mirrors in his own house, his sister Caroline helped and went on to find her comets of her own. And the king paid her salary for it, which was a big deal for a woman in the 1780s who wasn't washing clothes or, I guess, emptying bedpans. I mean, what did you do if you were a woman in the 1780s? You sure weren't an astronomer. And the king was paying you for that, right? In March of 1781, through a mirror he made himself, William sees an odd little disk in Gemini and writes that down, that it's a comet.

Marc: It wasn't a comet.

Renee: No, of course it wasn't.

Marc: Yeah, it was Uranus, the first planet discovered with a telescope. The solar system had been the same size since the ancients, and he doubled it in one evening. I don't know if people realize that. You can see all the planets out to Saturn with the naked eye. Yeah. And then you can't see Uranus or Neptune or Pluto with the naked eye. So like right then, you know, you put the telescope up and instantly the solar system is a different size. The king gave him money, and by 1789, he'd finished a 40-foot telescope with a 48-inch mirror, four foot wide.

Renee: That's huge.

Marc: Yeah. The biggest in the world for about half a century. Then comes the Irishman who made it ridiculous. William Parsons, the third Earl of Ross at Burg Castle. He'd first tried a mirror made of pieces soldered together for his earlier 36-inch, then learned to cast speculum metal solid. In 1845, he finished a 72-inch telescope whose mirror was cast in a single pore, and weighed about four tons. And he cast more than one, so one could be repolished while the other was in use. The tube hung between two stone walls, which limited how far it could swing. They called it the Leviathan of Parsontown, and it was the largest telescope on Earth for the next 70-odd years.

Renee: Dear Lord, it was the best of both worlds. It's hanging from somewhere by string, yet there's walls so it can't sway back and forth in the wind. Look, they improved on it. And it shows us something new. Frost pointed at the Whirlpool Galaxy and drew it. It had spiral arms. For the first time, someone saw structure in one of those faint cloud smudges. Nobody knew yet they were whole galaxies. That took another 80 years. But it was the first sign they had a shape. And for those of you keeping track, 1845 is the year the Irish famine begins. And for the next couple of years, this telescope mostly sat Isle while Ross ran famine relief on his estate. So it's there. It's redundant. It's ready to use. It's one of the wonders of the world. And then Irishmen start dying of starvation. And just for the record, that's when my family comes to America during the Irish family.

Marc: So they, they could, that's, see, they rejected astronomy, just like you did for 40 years.

Renee: Yes. Well, damn it, man, it's a smudge. Like, what the hell?

Marc: Who cares? The next change came from chemistry. In the 1850s, Léon Foucault, better known for the pendulum, works out how to deposit a thin layer of silver on glass. Now, you can make a mirror from a glass blank, lighter and easier to shape, and much better at holding its figure, with the surface reflecting around 90% of the light. When it tarnishes, you strip it and recode it without touching the shape underneath. Foucault also invented a test, the knife edge test. You light the mirror, you slice the beam with a razor, and the shadows tell you if the surface is accurate to a small fraction of a wavelength. A candle and a razor blade will find errors you could never measure with a ruler. That's, you know, Foucault's razor. Meanwhile, the lens, yeah, the lens people kept trying. And in 1790 or 1897, at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, they finished a 40-inch refractor. Still the biggest working lens telescopes ever built. This 40 inches turned out to be about the limit for a lens because the lens can only be held at its edge because the light has to pass through it. And a disc that that big sags under its own weight, a mirror can be supported across its whole back. So that's the limit, you know, until we find some special magical glass.

Renee: I feel like I wear those already because I have high compression. I feel like, yeah, I wear those every day. That special glass. And the man behind Yerkes, the 60-inch, 100-inch, and eventually the 200-inch is the same guy every time, George Ellery Hale, whose real superpower was shaking money out of rich people. In 1917, Hale gets his 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson above Pasadena, and the 100-inch is where the story turns. In 1912, a woman at Harvard named Henrietta Swan-Levitt, one of the human computers, is studying photographic plates of variable stars in the Magellanic clouds and noticed that for one kind of pulsing star, a Cepheid. Am I saying that right?

Marc: I think, yeah, close enough.

Renee: Yeah, close enough. Yeah, a Cepheid. There you go. The slower it pulses, the brighter it really is. That's the ruler. You know how bright it truly is to see how bright it looks, and you know how far away it is. She was paid about 30 cents an hour.

Marc: Well, I mean, what year was that, 1912?

Renee: Yeah, that's okay. Okay. In 1923, Edwin Hubble uses the 100-inch to find one of these in the Andromeda Nebula, runs it through Levitt's ruler, and it's far outside our galaxy. Andromeda is a galaxy. There are other galaxies. And in 1929, he shows they're flying away from us and that the universe is expanding. Hubble gets the telescope named after him. Levitt died in 1912, before any of it.

Marc: Yeah. Have you been to the Mount Wilson Observatory?

Renee: No, I've never been up there. No. Yeah. I don't even think I've been to the one up in...

Marc: What, Palomar? Griffith Park. Oh, Griffith Park? You've never been to Griffith Park? No. Oh, Griffith Park is so cool. So, like, Griffith Park is... Architecturally cool you know because it's that that los angeles you know kind of 20 something yeah that art deco kind of style that's really cool but yeah you can't see hardly anything out of there anymore you can see planets and stuff and that which is fun but but yeah i've seen i've been to palomar i've been to wilson i've been to griffith been to, have i been to monica i think i've been to monica too so yeah the wilson's yeah.

Renee: I haven't picked any of those off yet. I go to radio.

Marc: I know you like the radio.

Renee: I'm sad about Arecibo. Yeah, there's a bunch going on with me. I go to radio stuff.

Marc: Anyways, yeah. So that 100-inch blank was cast in France from green wine bottle glass. You know, bubbles and all, four and a half tons. Hale decided it would do because a better blank meant years of waiting. And it still took five years to grind to grind the figure. And by Hubble's date, nobody was looking with their eyes anymore. A photographic plate could sit under a telescope for hours and pile up light from things far too faint for an eye. Because an eye resets every fraction of a second, but plates were wasteful, catching maybe one or two percent of the light that hit them. The fix was a chip. In 1969, name at Bell Labs, Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the charge-coupled device as a kind of computer memory, supposedly in about an hour at a blackboard. It's like one of the napkins, you know, the ethernet napkins or something. Astronomers looked at it and said, huh, that's a light detector. By the late 1970s, they were bolting CCDs onto telescopes. That's CCD, the charge coupled device. And sensitivity jumped from a percent or two to 70 or 80 percent. Like, that's a huge difference. Boylan Smith got the Nobel Prize in 2009, and that same technology family ended up in digital cameras everywhere. Everybody carries one around in their pockets all the time.

Renee: Before we get to the biggest mirror, I have to jump back because I left out a whole kind of telescope and I won't sleep if we don't talk about it. Okay, so in 1932, a Bell Labs engineer named Carl Jansky was trying to find the source of static on a transatlantic radio calls. And he finds a steady hiss that rises and falls every 23 hours and 56 minutes. It's the time the stars take to come around. It's the center of the Milky Way. That's what he's hearing. It's the first radio telescope completely by accident. And Bell Labs moves him to something else. Then Groot Reber, a radio engineer in Wheaton, Illinois, builds a 31-foot dish in his own backyard in 1937 and maps the sky all by himself.

Marc: That's awesome. Can you imagine being that guy's neighbor? That's like...

Renee: Yeah, like, hey, Groot, what's that big bull for? Like, oh, listen to the galaxy, right? So after the war, it explodes. Jordel Bank in England... And in 1963, the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, 305 meters across, it's built into a natural sinkhole. Arecibo is badass. Like it was just, it was thunking into the ground. It took, it's in the movie GoldenEye in 1955.

Marc: It collapsed in 2020.

Renee: 1995. It collapsed in 2020 after the cables failed. And that was hard. That was hard. Although I have seen TikTokers and YouTubers and like people like that. Yeah. Try to run across it and it's so steep they can't get back up the other side yeah it's like that's not how that like it must look different than when you're in it right what an amazing thing it was listening for aliens everywhere and you want if you want to see it in a movie it's in the movie contact contact she starts out at arecibo so

Marc: Yeah i love that yeah i like that Like, yeah, the movie is okay. I like the, you know, kind of the VLA and then the Arecibo. Like, it's cool to see that stuff in the movie.

Renee: The radio stuff, right? I mean, it's easy for Hubble to be cool. It's harder for radio telescopes to be rad.

Marc: Yeah. You can't, like, yeah. A radio wave is hard to look at.

Renee: Right? Yeah, right? And they don't listen. They almost never listen to it in real time if you talk to the people at the very large Yeah,

Marc: Yeah, yeah.

Renee: Like, they're just, they're collecting the data.

Marc: All the time. Yeah, the data.

Renee: Yeah, constantly, unless they're doing any kind of maintenance. And you hardly ever see, I've seen it twice, but you hardly ever see the scopes all really close together because that means they're concentrating on one specific thing in the sky. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, things are really spread out and don't listen to all kinds of different stuff. But it's funny, as you're pulling into the space, it's like, turn off your phone. And you are literally sitting in a bowl. At the very large array, you're sitting in a bowl. There's mountains all around you. So it's the perfect place for it to be absolutely quiet until I get there. And every time I've gone, I'm proud to say I've dropped $250 at that gift shop. So I'll see you guys soon. I will drop another $250. I feel like I do my part for the VLA that way. Anyway, so that was it. So Cables failed at Arecibo. It was awful. It was the death of something pretty amazing. I still feel bad about it.

Marc: Well, we still have the VLA, so. Right. From the optical side, you know, the main event is still the biggest piece of glass anyone ever tried to make. Hale's last project in 1928, he gets Rockefeller Foundation money for a 200-inch mirror, twice the 100-inch. General Electric tries fused quartz and gives up after years of cracked and bubbled disks. So Hale goes to Corning and Pyrex. Of course, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you? Yeah, they're heat-resistant glass. In March of 1934, Corning pours the disk and part of the mold breaks loose. So it's ruined. They cooled it anyway as an experiment, and that failed disk sits at the Corning Museum of Glass today. Okay, that is a cool place.

Renee: That is i've never been i've been to the hormel museum but i've never been to the corning museum i've seen so many different kinds of spam it's not even funny like everyone they make yeah

Marc: I'm not sure the hormel you know museum is.

Renee: Like hey don't poo poo it it's right next to the corn palace you can just knock off a bunch of really rural stuff at once

Marc: It's good yeah no the corning museum is awesome. A lot of art there, too. The second pour works, though, and then it cooled for about a year, because glass that thick cooled quickly will crack from internal stress. So the back is a honeycomb of ribs cast with a mold full of pillars, which cut the weight while keeping it stiff, and Pyrex barely changes size with temperature. So as the dome cools through the night, the mirror holds its shape. By then, because I don't think people realize that, too, like, as if you, you know, okay, yeah, starlight is still light, and it still causes the metal, you know, the metal surface of that glass that's decoded to heat up. Yeah. And it changes. Yeah. So it's like, it's still, yeah, there's still heat there. Anyways, a Caltech physicist, John Strong, worked out how to vaporize aluminum in a vacuum chamber and coat the mirror with it. So it was tougher than silver and good into the ultraviolet, which is cool.

Renee: And it went across the country by train in 1936, slowly, with people lining the tracks to watch. Eleven years of grinding at Caltech, with a world war in the middle. Hale died in 1938 and never saw it done. It was dedicated in 1948 and stayed the largest effective telescope in the world until 1993. And then, the telescope story does something unexpected, And it turns out the best place for a telescope might not be a mountain at all. Can I tell you one thing really quick? They brought this shuttle Enterprise home to Los Angeles because it was going to go down to the Science Center. And they brought it past where we did our banking. Yeah. And then down. So we pick up the dogs and we go there. We stand on the side of the street on Sepulveda Boulevard. And we wait for this thing to come rolling by because they couldn't go more than three miles an hour or they would lose all their insurance. So it was the same thing. It wasn't the railroad. It was a Toyota Tundra dragging it down the road. It took four days to get it from the airport to downtown. Yeah. So yeah, and it was a big deal. A lot of Angelenos turned out to go watch that. Everywhere it went, it squeezed between people's apartment buildings on its way downtown. It was amazing.

Marc: They had to lift like telephone and power cables and stuff. Yeah, power cables everywhere.

Renee: They would take down telephone poles, put them back up when it went by. It was unbelievable. So I can see seeing this mirror go by on a train and everybody came out to see It. Yeah, of course. We did the same thing and it was an amazing thing to be a part of. Anyway, the idea is actually older than people think. In 1946, a Princeton astronomer named Lyman Spitzer writes a paper called Astronomical Advantage of an Extraterrestrial Observatory, which is a very polite way of saying, let's put the telescope above the air. That's for Sputnik, before anyone has a rocket that could actually do it. And his argument is a little unfair to every mountaintop observatory ever built that the sky was actually in the way. The sky's in the way.

Marc: Yeah, it is, though, right? The atmosphere is constantly moving. Pockets of warm and cool air. So a star that should be sharp, a sharp point, dances and blurs. That's why the stars twinkle, which is, you know, it's nice for a porch, but terrible for a telescope. The air also swallows chunks of the spectrum, most of the ultraviolet and a lot of the infrared. The plan came together in the late 70s, a 2.4-meter mirror, a little under 95 inches, designed so the space shuttle astronauts could service it and swap instruments. It was supposed to launch in 1983. The budget ballooned. The schedule slid. And in January 1986, the Challenger was lost, which was tragic, and every shuttle was grounded.

Renee: And the person I think deserves to be famous as the telescope is Nancy Grace Roman, who became NASA's first chief of astronomy in 1960 and spent nearly 20 years turning, wouldn't it be great, into budgets and congressional hearings. That's a talent.

Marc: That is a talent.

Renee: Like when you have a good chief NASA person who's good at doing that, you're lucky to have her. Colleagues called her the mother of Hubble. And I don't hear that as a cute nickname. I hear it as a job description. This telescope got named for Edwin Hubble, who never won a Nobel because astronomy wasn't eligible for the physics prize and who was lobbying to change that when he died in 1953. Anyway, I remember Challenger. I was a senior. Everybody remembers where they were. We were home from school that day. We were on the East Coast and it was a snow day, which says a lot because Florida had ice on the shuttle that morning. And I remember my mother waking me up and saying get up the shuttle exploded and i said no it didn't that's how like incomprehensible that idea was right like no it didn't she's like yes it did get up get up that that teacher died get up and so you get up and you turn on the tv and like that's where we just sat for the whole rest of the day it was a snow day so like the whole rest of the day we just sat there and watched her because they had a they had a simulcast to her kids in her class it was horrible. So yeah, we all know where we were on that day. And a lot of people don't remember it because they're a younger generation. But I remember where I was. I was a senior in high school. I remember what happened. It was terrible. Anyway, I remember Challenger. The Hubble was kept in a clean room in California because we weren't doing the shuttle program anymore. There was no way to get it up there. Being kept alive for years. So then on April 24th, 1990, Discovery carries it up and lets it go. I was 21 by then, right? And my first real job and the coverage was enormous. It was the eye in the sky. They called it the eighth wonder of the world. Today, even today, you can go visit any other countries. Like, go to the UK's Science and Technology Museum.

Marc: Oh, yeah.

Renee: Yeah. And there's a Hubble hanging in the lobby. Like, so many nations contributed to that that we all call it our own. And I'll tell you, every country I go to, there's something Hubble somewhere in their science something. Because it was the eighth wonder of the world. It really was amazing. It was amazing. Yep.

Marc: I was 16, you know, when it launched. I had been a subscriber to Astronomy Magazine for years. I had models of the space shuttle and like with a miniature Hubble. So lots of hope and curiosity. And then, you know, the first pictures come back and they weren't good. A bright star should be a tiny sharp point. And instead it was a point wrapped in a big hazy halo and nothing, you know, would tighten it. In June, NASA announced the primary mirror was flawed. Can you imagine? Like, oh my gosh.

Renee: Having to say that out loud. Yeah, I know. We know what it is.

Marc: Gee, guys, I'm sorry. You know, the mirror is flawed. The name is spherical aberration. A properly shaped mirror brings all the light centered to edge to one focus, and this one didn't. The edge was too flat by about, and this is just like crazy. 2.2 microns, roughly a 50th of a width of a human hair. And the mirror was polished beautifully among the smoothest surfaces ever made by a human. And it had just been polished to the wrong curve on a telescope that cost $1.5 billion. The investigation was led by Lev Allen, who ran JPL. and it traced the arrow to a test instrument called a reflective, I love JPL, a reflective null corrector. You can't just look at a big mirror and tell if it's the right shape. So you bounce light off of it through a small assembly of two mirrors and a lens built to behave like a perfect mirror would. And you compare... If the pattern matches the mirror's right, that assembly had been built with a lens about 1.3 millimeters out of position, roughly two credit cards stacked. So the mirror matched the instrument perfectly, but the instrument itself was wrong.

Renee: Yeah, okay, that's the engineering version. There were other tests. Perkins Elmer had a second null corrector, and when it was used, it showed the error. Another device measured the mirror's radius, and that also pointed at trouble. Remember Foucault's razor and candle and razor blade? That's the whole point of a test like that is having a second way to ask the mirror what its shape is. Hubble had second ways. The numbers were on paper. The people involved explained them away because the main test said the mirror was perfect. And then there's the contract because Perkins Elmer was the lowest bidder at about $64 million. Isn't that NASA story is like the lowest bidder, right? Because it gets them into so much trouble. Anyway, Kodak bidding with iTech came in close to $100 million, and its plan had the two companies checking each other's mirrors, independent checks, so it most certainly would have caught this. NASA took the cheap one. Kodak ground a backup mirror anyway, and it's in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum now. And I don't think anyone there is stupid, right? They were under a crushing schedule and budget pressure that they did to themselves, and then a program that slipped for years. I'm sure like do we need another test starts to sound like a luxury it wasn't one person's blunder it was a pile of reasonable people each doing something that made sense in the moment which i guess is what you could say about challenger oh and deep water horizon I don't know that any of that makes it right right yeah

Marc: Yeah. The investigation said roughly that, right? The company had placed complete reliance on one instrument to both make and verify the mirror and contradicting data got dismissed. But you guys, like risk management, right? Like this is like the risk of getting it wrong. Isn't just that you got to redo the mirror. It's you launched it into space and it's wrong. And now you got to do something with it. Like, I don't know. That's a lot. Anyways, that left the question of whether you could fix a mirror you couldn't touch hundreds of miles up. The error was known, precisely measured, and consistent. And spherical aberration is a clean mathematical shape, so you can build another optical element with the exact opposite error, and then the two cancel out. That's how eyeglasses work, bending the light the other way before it reaches the eye. A second-generation camera, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, was already being built, and they ground the opposite error into its internal relay mirrors. For the other instruments, they designed a box called COSTAR. Cute. The corrective optics space telescope axial replacement, and with small mirrors on arms that swing out into the light path.

Renee: Meanwhile, the country's laughing at you, right? David Letterman did a top 10 list of Hubble excuses. I was trying to find them online, but everything I, you know, I have to, I think one of them was the guy at Sears said it would work. Like, that was number 10. Number 10 was the guy at Sears said it would work. So Letterman did a top 10 of Hubble excuses. It became shorthand for government waste and a spacecraft program full of nerds who can't measure a mirror. Part of me was embarrassed for NASA, and part of me, a 21-year-old who'd been promised a comet four years earlier, thought, well, of course, of course it's a thing with the picture on the box doesn't look like the picture on the box, right? Every stupid telescope you buy has a stupid picture of stupid Saturn, and it always looks like it does. The way, I guess, like Voyager saw it, I didn't see it that way. Again, it was a smudge. I'm sorry. I'm getting way okay. And the PR version of the fix is contact lenses for Hubble, which sounds cute and completely undersells everything. CoStar was about the size of a phone booth, and it went in by hand. So December 1993, Endeavor flies up with seven astronauts and over five spacewalks in 11 days, a record, by the way, a team led by Story Musgrave and Jeff Hoffman pull out an instrument and slid in a phone booth, replaced the solar arrays that had been flexing and shaking the telescope, swapped the gyroscopes, installed a new camera, and then came back in. If any piece of that failed, it wasn't a telescope problem. It was the end of the shuttle program's credibility. I was 25. I watched it like the Super Bowl. It really was. To see those guys out there being like this better work. Like, seriously, that's kind of where they at with the two was like this better work. Like, it was a lot of work.

Marc: They did it though. The image I remember is probably like January 1994. The before and after of the same star. Before a blob and a halo and after a tight, clean point. Even the blurry Hubble did real science. The error was so exactly understood that astronomers could use software to partly undo the blur. So they got useful results on bright, simple targets while they waited.

Renee: You spend a year being humiliated on late night television and you send people out with a handful of tools and it works. And the punchline becomes the most beloved telescope in history because we really do love Hubble. I wish we could bring it home. We can't.

Marc: No. Didn't it already burn up?

Renee: It's going to burn up on reentry.

Marc: I thought it didn't already. I thought it did, but maybe not.

Renee: No, no, it's still up there. No, it's still up there. It's still, I guess they're still waiting for it to die. It's still working. So they're going to leave it there until it doesn't. And then it's like Space Lab. I wonder if we bring it in and it hits the ocean or it hits Portland. I don't know. We'll see. It'll be fun. People don't remember Space Lab. We were watching it like enter the atmosphere being like, oh my god, is it going to hit New York? Yeah. Because it just did it itself. It just fell out of orbit. It was bad. Anyway, so here's where I get to be smugged because the repaired Hubble was the greatest vindication a nerd ever got. in November of 1955,

Marc: You get the Eagle Nebula picture.

Renee: 95. You get the Eagle. I don't know why I keep, I'm tired. In November of 1995, you get the Eagle Nebula picture whose towers of gas and dust were stars being born and the pillars of creation. Like that's crazy. I love that one.

Marc: I know it's beautiful. That's my favorite picture. Yeah.

Renee: Right. And the picture ended up on every dorm room wall that wanted to look smart. And then in December of 1995, Hubble does the most audacious thing anyone ever did with a telescope. The man who ran the Institute, Robin Williams, took some of the discretionary time directors keep for themselves, scope time. And instead of pointing it at something famous, which is what you did with this stuff, you pointed it at something famous because you knew it was there, right? He pointed it at nothing. A blank patch of sky near the Big Dipper about the size of a dime seen from 75 feet away for 10 days. I was 27. I remember standing there with the newspaper thinking, wait, this is all galaxies, like every single dot, every single dot. We thought we thought there were a handful of galaxies and that the universe was empty when the deep field photo came back and every single thing in that thing was a galaxy. I think we all just fell off our chair. Right. It was overwhelming. It was an overwhelming amount of something I'd never, and where I'd expected, I think everybody expected, people told him, don't waste your scope time on this. What the hell?

Marc: It's the darkest, it's the darkest section of sky.

Renee: Yes. Yes. And Mark's going to find this sentimental, but, you know, that's when I forgave the smudge. Like at that point I was like, all right, you win. I forgave it.

Marc: You forgave the smudge. Yeah. Okay. That is sentimental. Yeah. The deep field came back with something like 3,000 galaxies in a patch that looked empty. It's like notoriously the darkest part of the sky. Some from when the universe was a fraction of its current age. Meanwhile, the ground-based people just, they didn't give up. In 1993, the Keck telescope, yay, Keck, opened on Mauna Kea, and its mirror is 10 meters wide, far bigger than the 200 inch, and it's made of 36, okay, that is pretty cool. I've seen the segments and stuff, they're neat. Now, 36 hexagonal segments, because don't cast the thing all at once, cast 36, you know, the bunch of segments. Each about the size of a dining table, though, so they're still pretty freaking big. And they're fitted like a honeycomb. But there's all sorts of really cool ways that they're fitted together and the sensors and actuators constantly nudge each other, you know, each one. So the whole thing behaves as a single perfect surface. It ended the Hale telescope's reign as the largest after 45 years. And then you add some of the adaptive optics. You measure the atmosphere blur using a bright star or a laser beamed up to make an artificial one. And then a thin deformable mirror changes shape hundreds or thousands of times a second to cancel the distortion. It was partly developed for military uses, tracking satellites through bad air, declassified in the early 90s. But you've done right, a mountaintop telescope can match the sharpness of one in orbit in certain wavelengths.

Renee: There's a lazy version of all this where Hubble made the ground obsolete, and that's wrong. The ground gives you huge mirrors you can fix with a wrench. Space gives you uninterrupted sight. Astronomers use both constantly, and the two keep lending each other tricks. At the end of the 90s, teams using both worked out that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, which won a Nobel Prize in 2011, and is the reason you've heard the phrase dark energy at all. And now Mark gets to have his moment because he can't stay calm about Webb. And I'll do the setup. Webb was supposed to cost about a billion dollars and launch around 2007. It cost about 10 billion and launched on Christmas Day 2021. And it had something Hubble never did. It went to a spot about a million miles out, four times farther than the moon, where there is no repair mission, no astronauts with a wrench. If something went wrong, it stayed that way.

Marc: Yeah, the web is really freaking cool. Yeah, so everything has to be verified, right? There is a list of about 344 single points of failure, steps where if one thing didn't work, then the mission was over. The mirror is six and a half meters across eight hexagonal segments, and it had to fold up to fit in the rocket and unfold in space like origami. The segments are beryllium. They're light and stiff and stable when extremely cold, with a coating of gold a few hundred atoms thick, because gold reflects infrared exceptionally well. Each segment, because contrary to popular belief, it's actually freaking hot in space. In space. Yeah. Yeah, it's not cold. But it's not really, yeah, it's both. Anyways. Yeah, each segment can be moved by actuators in steps of about 10 nanometers, and the team lined them up using the telescope's own images. They tested the mirror in a cryogenic chamber at temperatures it would normally operate at because mirrors change shape when they get cold. Hubble was a shape era nobody caught before launch, so Webb got the whole system checked end-to-end in actual real conditions.

Renee: It now added a lot of engineers who lived through the Hubble humiliation ended up on Webb, and the people who have been publicly embarrassed. I mean, this is true about anybody who gets caught in compliance crap. They start to take their checklist very seriously. The infrared part is my favorite piece. The universe is expanding, so light from the first galaxy has been stretched on its way here, and the visible light turns to infrared. To see it, you need an infrared telescope, and anything warm glows in the infrared, including the telescope itself. So Webb has to be freezing. A sunshield the size of a tennis court, five layers of thin film unfolded in space, and the cold side drops to around minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit.

Marc: Yeah, this is a whole different set of engineering problems to have. Any heat that you get in the system can't dissipate, right? So it has to go somewhere. Well, let's explain it.

Renee: It's because you're in a vacuum and it has nowhere to go.

Marc: There's nowhere to go. Space is a vacuum.

Renee: There's no oxygen to take it. There's no wind to get it. There's no fan to drag it out. It just sits there.

Marc: Yeah, so it has to go somewhere. Heat sinks, you know, and setting up this giant, you know, basically shield, you know, keeps more radiation from the sun, you know, from getting into different things. So, yeah, it's super, like, this is why we're not going to have data centers in space, people. I'm sorry. Right. Like, I know that SpaceX is, you know, selling, you know, a lot, trillions of valuation, all that stuff. We're not going to have data centers in space. It's, in order to cool. Well, in order to cool a freaking GPU, you have to have giant, you know, huge arrays of heat sinks. It's just, it's not going to happen.

Renee: And then the size of tennis courts, and there's five of them. Whenever you see that photo of Webb, you'll see five, what looks like Mylar things under it. That's all for heat dissipation. Yeah. And to keep it cold. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah, it's like people.

Renee: But you're going to have 10 GPUs. It's going to be the size of a refrigerator. And you're going to have what? 18 football field size of those big boys? Like, I don't know how you're going to do this.

Marc: Yeah. And then you've got, like, free radicals in space. Like, you know, you've got, not free radicals, but, like, you know, photons and cosmic rays. Yeah.

Renee: Anyways. Solar wind. I don't... Yeah. Yeah. All right. Go ahead.

Marc: Anyways. All right. Sorry. Yeah. Side track here.

Renee: Totally okay. Yeah.

Marc: The first images came out in July of 2022. A patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. And this time, thousands of galaxies in one frame. Many of them bent into arcs. That is a cool, I love that picture too. The ones where you can see the lensing and stuff. Yeah, many of them bent into arcs by the gravity of a cluster in front of them. Some with the light that had traveled more than 13 billion years.

Renee: And the ground's been busy too. The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile released its first images in the summer of 2025. An 8.4 meter mirror, a camera about the size of a small car, 3,200 megapixels, scanning the whole southern sky every few nights for 10 years. People call it the movie of the universe. And it's its first observation. It's found over 2,000 asteroids that no one has ever seen. I love Vera Rubin. I love that observatory.

Marc: Yeah, no, it's really cool. Isn't the next iPhone, like, supposed to have 3,200 megapixels? Sorry, no.

Renee: I don't know. Looking at the size of that camera, I hope not. It won't fit in my handbag.

Marc: Yeah. Okay. And then Nancy Grace Roman, and remember her from previous, right, Space Telescope, launched at the end of August. It mirrors the same size as Hubble's, 2.4 meters. And it started life as hardware built for spy satellites that the National Reconnaissance Office handed to NASA. But its field of.

Renee: View is— They literally called them and said, we got this stuff left over.

Marc: Do you want it? Like, yes. Do you want it?

Renee: Yes, we do. Send it right on over.

Marc: Yeah, but that's one way to save money. But its field of view is 100 times larger than Hubble's. So it can take that grain of sand picture across a huge field quickly over and over. First pictures are expected early next year. In the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, A mirror almost 40 meters across made of nearly 800 segments is supposed to see the first light near the end of this decade.

Renee: I'll be 61. How old are you going to be? 29?

Marc: Yeah, 29.

Renee: 50, no.

Marc: 55, 54, 55, something, wherever. Anyway, here's something I looked up. Halley's Comet comes back in the summer of 2061, and you'd be 93-ish.

Renee: Don't. I'd be 93. And I intend to be sitting in a very good chair with a very good telescope. And if it's a smudge again, I'm going to have words with that comet. You'd be, what, 86? Oh, you can come pick me up.

Marc: Yeah, I can come pick you up. Yeah, I'll bring a big scope, like a big 13-inch scope. Yeah.

Renee: So you'll be doing a nudging so long drift anyway that nancy grace roman can i just say nancy grace roman is my she's my fashion hero too like you see the way she dressed in the 50s and 60s i'm like girl

Marc: Yeah my heart um.

Renee: Yeah it's my aesthetic and i know she was doing she would

Marc: Rock those glasses.

Renee: She did and vera c rubin observatory are built to investigate dark matter and dark energy Vera Rubin was the astronomer whose measurements of how fast galaxy spin gave us the strongest early evidence for dark matter. Thanks to Webb, we are rewriting cosmology, and the Rubin Observatory required us to invent data collection, transmission, and storage strategies for the largest digital camera ever created by human hands. Our understanding of the universe is tied to our investment in this kind of technology. And I don't think we have any idea how any of it actually work. And the legacies of two women are about to tell us more than we have ever known. I'm excited for the future. What a time to be alive there.

Marc: There you go. See, it can be a positive. It can be a feel good. It can be a positive show. Yeah, it can be a positive show. So it doesn't always turn into software is going to take you.

Renee: Someone died and it's all going to end badly.

Marc: The tech bros. See, there's no money in astronomy, right?

Renee: There you go. It can't be that corrupted, right? Yeah, exactly.

Marc: The tech bros can't mess it up. I think this is, you know, I love all this stuff. But the thing that I really love about this is that Lippertschild wanted to spot ships, right? He didn't want to look at the sky. He didn't want to, you know, find galaxies or anything like that. He just wanted, like, he wanted to find ships and sell it to the Navy, and then Galileo did sell it to the Navy. Nobody who built the first one could have told you what it was for. And I bet there's a piece of glass or a chip in some lab right now that's the same kind of thing. And I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

Renee: Nobody who built the first one could have told you what it was for. We can put that on a mug.

Marc: That'd be a good thing on a mug. Yeah, we could put that on a mug. Roman's first pictures are due early next year, and I'm going to refresh the national page like it's a ticket sale. So, you know, like when the web pictures came out, every time they do a drop of pictures, yeah, the NASA site gets traffic issues. So, yeah.

Renee: Every time they do it, though, they come out like, you know, astronomers know this is wrong. Like, oh, my God, what? Like, what? Like, everything that comes out of this telescope, there's, I think it's Vera Rubin, has red dots in it. It's all redshift. Like, we've seen farther back in the universe than we've ever seen. And so we didn't know. We it's redshift like they're seeing galaxy and here's one that kills me we see these galaxies that happened at the beginning of time like at the beginning of the i'm using air quotes big bang right and why are they so organized and why are they so big like that shouldn't be yeah you know what my answer to that is right like we're living in a black hole and you're looking out the event horizon that's another universe and it's pretty mature like i swear to god i'm I think we're going to learn some crazy stuff over the next 10 or 20 years. I'm not saying any of it's not real. It's going to be an amazing time to be alive, honestly.

Marc: All right. That's the Nostalgic Nerds. If there's an old telescope in your garage, go dust it off and write to us at NostalgicNerdsPodcast at gmail.com.

Renee: And if somebody at a star party offers you a look through theirs, say yes and try not to call it a smudge. Oh, hey, and when we were doing research for this, we found places in the country. Oh, yeah. Texas is one of them, right? Where you can ship your telescope. They will put it up in a very, very, very dark, like, warehouse, right? They roll the top of the warehouse back, and you remote into your telescope and look at the night sky in a place where it gets really, really dark. So, hey, all you amateur people, if you do that, tell us. We'd love to hear about it.

Marc: That would be cool.

Renee: That would be really cool. We want to meet somebody that does this. If you don't do this and you want to see stuff in the night sky, there's places you can do it. Go look it up. Anyway.

Marc: There you go. All right.

Renee: You can sign us off. Yeah. Stay nostalgic. Be kind and rewind. Thanks, you guys. Hey, don't forget, merch. We have some out there at the website. And thanks for subscribing. Tell someone, make sure you like us on platforms that you're listening and we'll catch you next time. Thanks, Mark.

Marc: All right. Thanks. This is not an angry one.

Renee: No, this is happy. This is happy.

Marc: This is good. This is a happy one.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: There's no astronomy as a service. There's no telescope. No, right? Although telescope as a service, that telescope farm, that kind of is.

Renee: I want to start one. You know, out in Joshua Tree, if it's just not windy that night.

Marc: I know Joshua Tree.

Renee: Walk out there, open the lid on the container. Yeah. We just put them all in a container thing and just be like, I'll see you guys when the sun comes up. And just go home, right? I think that's the best thing I've ever heard of. I want to do it.

Marc: I thought it was cool. It's got to be out somewhere in West Texas or something. But there's a lot of huge places.

Renee: Well, yeah, it has to be dark, right? Dark, yeah. Joshua Tree is it though. That's a dark park.

Marc: Yeah, Joshua Tree is pretty dark. Yeah.

Renee: And they sell land really close, like really close.

Marc: Or out there in freaking Death Valley, you know?

Renee: Death Valley's another good one. Thermal, there's tons of land right there.

Marc: That's true. Because nobody wants to live there. Nobody wants to live there. You pop up. You know what? You hook up. There you go. I just found a good use for the Tesla batteries. You just get a bunch, big old bank of Tesla batteries. You put up the solar panels. You charge during the day. And then you roll back the thing at night. and then run the telescopes with the remote and everything off of the batteries. Yeah.

Renee: I like it.

Marc: I mean, I thought, I don't know. I didn't know Julian.

Renee: Julian, California is a dark city. A dark city.

Marc: I know. That's crazy. Isn't that cool?

Renee: That is cool. That means they have, like, no streetlights. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Marc: I think, I don't know, you know, there was, because I used to do all this, you know, this astronomy magazine, and, you know, I took you guys out and everything, and, I mean, it used to be a big issue for me, but living here in Europe, it's like, There's so much density that there's hardly anywhere that is dark.

Renee: Oh, you have no dark protected places.

Marc: Yeah, there are up north. Oh, okay. But London casts such a big glow that you've got to get way far away from it.

Renee: Yeah, LA was always planets. It was never anything else.

Marc: Yeah, not until you got out to the desert where we were. yeah yeah i don't know okay you're ready yeah, yeah i love that i was promised a comet.

Renee: I was okay i'm going ready five four