Astronomers in a Wood

Twenty-six miles north of Harvard University is the sylvan town of Harvard. On a wooded hill of Harvard town last week assembled a congeries of learned men and not a few women. An imaginative person versed in pagan lore might have guessed that this company in the woods was a sabbat of warlocks and witches who had coursed here from coverts in every cranny of the world. For they talked of things beyond ordinary men's ken--of island universes racing 7,000 miles a second, of the universe exploding into chaos, of the moon's shadow on the clouds. For such talk 400 years ago they would have been racked, flayed, burned as heretics. Last week, as the International Astronomical Union they were feted and fed. Harvard's David Bedell Pickering nimbly took their pictures and Cambridge's Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, broadcasting his description of an expanding universe, tangled his feet in the microphone cord.

New Observatory. One day was solemn. The seers of the heavens trooped before a big, partially completed building to watch & hear Professor Harlow Shapley, head of the Harvard Observatory, place some Pickering photographs in a copper box with some other documents. This, he said, he was doing to enlighten astronomers five centuries from now as to how far advanced the present-day astronomer is.

Thereupon he put the box in a hole in the wall of the new building, and handed a marked brick to England's Astronomer-Royal, Sir Frank Watson Dyson. The Astronomer-Royal patted some mortar on the brick and with it plugged the hole-in-the-wall which contained the copper box. saying: "As is the custom of godfathers. I place the care of this magnificent observatory into the hands of its most capable parents. . . "

Harvard's new observatory will contain a 61-in. telescope, as will the University of Toronto's new Dunlap Observatory. For a half dozen years those will rank as the world's fourth largest instruments, after Carnegie Institution's 100-in. telescope at Mount Wilson, the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory's 72-in. at Victoria, B. C.. Perkins Observatory's 69-in. at Delaware, Ohio. Near Bloemfontein, South Africa Harvard owns a 60-incher. The Harvard observatories at Bloemfontein and Harvard (the town) are practically equidistant from the equator, positions which give Harvard well-nigh perfect opportunity to rake the heavens and amplify patient Dr. Annie Jump Cannon's stupendous catalog of the stars (more than 225,000 spectra already).

Other New Observatories. One old and one new reason limited Harvard's tenure of fourth-biggest-telescope position. The old reason is California Institute of Technology's intention of building a 200- in. telescope in California, near Mount Wilson's 100-incher. Two factors delay Caltech: 1) Dr. Elihu Thomson of General Electric does not yet see his way toward making the necessary fused quartz disk which will be nearly as wide as a two-story building is high; nor has any other mirror-builder come forward with a sound plan for building the vast platter; 2) Caltech must wait until the securities which it owns appreciate in income and market value before spending large sums.

The fresher news which shoves Harvard out of the "biggest" spotlight developed last week. The University of Texas and the University of Chicago are going to cooperate in setting up an 80-in. telescope in a new McDonald Observatory, probably among the Davis Mountains in Jeff Davis County, Tex. Chicago's smart President Robert Maynard Hutchins and Texas' prudent President Harry Yandell Benedict made the deal. Texas will pay for the telescope, buildings, maintenance, and publications. Chicago will pay salaries of the. astronomical staff and will provide special working paraphernalia, such as photographic materials. Director of new McDonald and old Yerkes Observatories is Russian-born-&-educated Dr. Otto Struve, 35, astrophysicist, who last July succeeded his chief, blind Dr. Edwin Brant Frost, as director of Yerkes.

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