South of Tucson, where I-19 cuts off from I-10, the mile markers turn into kilometer markers, as if preparing one for Mexico. I wonder if they make their signs in miles on the other side, out of reciprocity.
A few miles south of Tucson I make a spontaneous decision, to get off on the highway west throught the desert through the Indian reservation. It's the road out to the Kitt Peak National Observatory. My uncle had suggested I go. It would be an hour's drive each way. I had time. There was no reason not to. It seemed like a shame not to go.
There was a time in my life when observational astronomy was the coolest thing to me. In seventh grade I was fascinated by the study of stars and planets. I looked over catalogues of telescopes and dreamed of building and owning one.
The interest gave way to other things, but survived in some form up through my undergraduate years at Willamette. It helped drive my interest in physics, especially celestial mechanics. But I had become more interested in theory than the gritty work of experiment. One learns these things about oneself.
In fact it was exactly twenty-five years ago this spring, while at Willamette, that I did my most extensive sky observations with a telescope. My physics adviser, who was the department chairman, had told his students that the department owned an 8-inch reflector that students could use with permission. I wanted to use it, so I got permission, which included a semester-long pass signed by campus security. About half a dozen times that spring I went up to the top of Collins Hall on campus and wheeled the telescope out on the roof to look at Jupiter, Saturn, and other planets. I was probably one of the few students who ever asked for the privilege of using it. My professors thought I was an odd duck, I'm sure.
By graduate school, I realized that in the great division of labor that makes science, working in observatories was the task for other people. My old interest in telescopes seemed a quaint relic of boyhood.
In the flatness of desert, the white domes of the observatory were visible on top of the mountain for over twenty miles away. A cutoff road from the main highway winds up along the mountainside---closed at night for obvious reasons of preventing the contamination of headlights.
Four thousand feet above the desert floor, the road makes one last hairpin turn around the giant four meter telescope that crowns the highest summit of the peak. I parked by the visitor's center and walked towards the visitor center. There was a large sign greeting visitors and listing the universities all over the country that participate in funding and operating the facility.
I went inside the visitor's center to pick up a map for a self-guided tour. There were over a dozen telescopes in various buildings on the mountaintop, three of which were open to the public during the day.
There was a flattened penny machine right by the door. It's my little fun habit---the one thing I collect that is purely frivolous---flattened pennies. It's cheap---universally fifty-one cents, including the penny itself. I cranked the large wheel, turning it to the design I wanted. As I did, a flattened penny that had been left in the machine by the previous user felt into the slot with a clank. It was the first freebie of my collection. My lucky day, no doubt.
I took the walking tour, first heading back to the 4-meter telescope, the largest one of the facility. An elevator takes one up four stories. Then you climb a couple flights of stairs to a gallery that lets you look into the telescope area. The dome was closed and the facility was dark. Of course it was off hours. There were no astronomers present. It was impressive. I lingered letting my eyes run over the contours of the giant device, discerning the function of various parts. There were displays on the wall describing the history and construction in the late 1960s.
Like all scientific experimental facilities, it had a typical spartan industrial feel. Scientific labs in movies and television are always busy and warm. Real ones feel like power plants or factories.
After the 4-meter scope, I walked back to the visitor center and up the small hill to the 2-meter scope. It was the original telescope on the mountain, built in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Curiously it went into operation in 1962, the same year as the Titan II missile silo I'd visited (and the same year as that Route 66 episode shot in Tucson). The building had a similar feel to the silo, from a time in history when America was obsessed and excelled with pure functionality. On the way up the stairs I mused about the parallels and anti-parallels between the two facilities, one buried deep in the ground, the other as exposed as possible on top of a mountain.
When I got the top of the stairs, where the gallery lets one see into the scope, my eyes fell upon the enormous metal base and my mind was filled with a sudden disorientation of time and space. Written in large cursive script, within a circle a foot in diameter was the word Willamette.
I put my face up to the glass to a closer look and make out the smaller text: "Willamette Iron and Steel Works, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A." The name is fairly common in Oregon, as it happens, but it's rare to find it elsewhere in the country (I later discovered that the shipyards remained in operation until 1990).
The last stop on the tour was the solar observatory, which is a large diagonal shaft into the mountain that collects sunlight from a rotating mirror. It's perhaps the facility for which Kitt Peak is best known, one of the finest in the world for solar astronomy.
Walking up to the large diagonal structure, I passed a small building with a sign indicating courtesy of quiet, since there might be people sleeping inside during the day. The building looked original from the late 1950s, the kind one sees at many facilities from that era. Nearby was an ancient basketball court, the hoop missing a net, and the pavement cracked. I could picture generations of scientists playing pick up games there. I wondered if anyone still used it. Fifty years ago, in the boom of postwar expansion, scientific work was a young man's game, supervised by old men. I suspect the average age of those working at Kitt Peak has increased over the years.
Unlike the other telescopes, the solar observatory was of course in use during the day. One could look into the long shaft, and also peak into the darkened lab where a row of lights indicated instruments in operation. On the wall were a series of posters indicating the size of the Sun compared to other known stars in the Galaxy, all the way up to VV Cephei, compared to which the Sun is vanishingly small (see this, for example).
There is something so compelling about solar astronomy, and the theory of stellar structure. If I had a chance to study it again, I'd jump at the chance. But I had desire to be of the busy hands operating the telescope. That work of gathering data is left to those with a passion for it.
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