Made to Order

A massive telescopic camera specially designed for photographing meteors was shipped last week to Harvard's meteor station near Las Cruces, N.Mex. Weighing 5,000 Ibs. and mounted on an odd, horseshoe yoke, it looks like nothing else on earth. The outer lens, 18 in. in diameter, is as convex as a fishbowl. Inside are other lenses, one of them also bowl-shaped, and a 23-in. concave mirror. The film is placed between the lenses and sucked by a vacuum against the curved surface.

This weird optical system enables the camera to cover a 52DEG field, taking in one-tenth of the area of the visible sky. Where earlier meteor cameras were blind to any meteor smaller than a marble, the new model will photograph the tracks of meteors as small as buckshot. As soon as a duplicate camera is completed, the meteormen can compare their films and tell by triangulation the distance and altitude of each meteor trail.

The new camera will not be used merely for scientific sport. Photographing meteors has a direct bearing on practical military technology. The meteors that bombard the outer fringes of the atmosphere are excellent tools for studying that inaccessible region. Their trails tell much about the composition, temperature and density of the outermost air. Such information is vitally important for the designers of high-flying guided missiles.

Meteor study is also useful to missilemen in another way. When meteors shoot through the air, they get white hot and most of them evaporate. This same thing happens to some extent with guided missiles. The German V-2 actually lost some of its metal by evaporation while descending through the atmosphere. By learning more about this effect, the meteormen hope to help the missile designers keep their "birds" from evaporating.

Like the Transverse Panoramic Camera (TIME, March 12), the meteor camera is a product of the Perkin-Elmer Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., founded in 1939 by Richard S. Perkin, a bored Wall Street man whose hobby was amateur astronomy. Teaming up with another amateur astronomer, Charles W. Elmer, he was soon turning out such optical oddities as prisms of poisonous thallium iodide (for infrared work), as well as flame photometers and infra-red spectrometers.

The fishbowl lenses of the meteor camera almost stopped even Perkin-Elmer. "When we first saw the plans," said Perkin, "we thought we would be nuts to tackle it." But their job turned out almost too well. The camera forms a star image so small and sharp that it hits only one or two grains in the sensitive emulsion on a photographic film. As a result, the camera must be used slightly out of focus to make star images big enough for easy study.

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