Sky & Telescope November 2003 [antikvár]

focal pointGleanings from the GlassIn the optical shop ofAdler Planetarium, Richard Fisherlearned valuable lessons about telescopes and life.Somewhere in the library of a Chicago public school is a well-worn book bound in green cloth. My name might be the only one on the dog-eared card tucked inside, but it is scrawled dozens of times on both front and back. That beloved book, a story about an old man with a telescope on his roof and the young boy he taught to love the stars, stood by me well toward the end of elementary school. Its magic was that the story seemed so familiar and so extraordinary at the same time. There could be no greater adventure than to gaze at the stars and thus enter a world of infinite, awesome beauty and never-ending surprise. But it was also a world where you needed a guide to show you the way: a mentor, a wizard, a trustworthy friend.For me the golden age of astronomy came when children's books were still illustrated with Schiaparelli's canals on Mars and with Jovian clouds more breathtakingly technicolor than an Elizabeth Taylor movie. On our back porch I erected a small telescope on a tripod only a foot high. With it I searched for the diaphanous Pleiades, the tantalizing daub of the Crab Nebula, and the golden disk of Jupiter, whose tiny Galilean moons glinted like four angels freshly snared from the head of a pin.But soon, having reached the limit of what could be accomplished on my own, I resolved to widen my astronomical horizons. That quest led me to Adler Planetarium, where I discovered like-minded skywatchers congregating in an optical shop tucked away in the building's basement. There I quickly became obsessed with grinding and polishing a mirror for my own Newtonian telescope. Nothing against the sky show upstairs, but my world was in the bowels of the planetarium: intently circling those 55-gallon oil drums, a chorus of carborundum grating in my ears, rouge and barnesite slipping silkily through my fingers, the diffraction pattern of optical flats casting a ghoulish glare, and the kidney-shaped shadows of the crowning Foucault test emerging from a razor's edge.Overseeing the optical shop were two graduate students in physics, Rich from the University of Chicago and Ron from Circle Campus. Together with a gaggle of mostly teenage youths half-aspiring to study at Caltech or MIT, we "regulars" worked with mystic devotion on weekends to keep alive the flame ignited by Allyn J. Thompson and Albert G. Ingalls in their scriptural texts on amateur telescope making. Next to the pizzas on Friday night, we slavered most at the mention of Maksutov-Cassegrains, anything having to do with "Zeiss, Jena," and that mecca of optical tinkerers, Edmund Scientific.However, nothing could top the completion of my first 6-inch mirror with its Ko-wave paraboloidal perfection, an accomplishment that still holds a special place in my life. But memorable as well remain the collaborative efforts it took to bring the project from blank Pyrex disk to the last quarter turn of the diagonal's spider-mount. The directors and the older boys provided a sharper eye to detect the last few pitsthat needed to be smoothed away, a helping hand when hot pitch threatened to overflow the lap, and patient initiation into the subtleties of figuring a mirror. This informal buddy system taught me the fruits of cooperation, the discipline of completing a multitask job, and the importance of fulfilling my role wherever I stood on the ladder. Even more than school or sports or summer jobs, the optical shop brought home important lessons in being a team player and in becoming a citizen.For some time now, leaders in higher education have been boosters of collaborative learning. As a teacher of the humanities, I too follow this model, from which today's students reap special rewards. But the ideal of collaborative learning needs to be experienced before college, and fortunately it is alive and available in many areas outside of academic life. My professional career is now far afield from the concerns of astrophysics and cosmology. Yet while I may never grasp the complexities of Calabi-Yau manifolds or the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, I can still count on the myriad resources open to the amateur astronomer pursuing a passion: peers of like mind, astronomical associations and periodicals, observatory outreach programs, even the chaotic generosity of the Internet.As data and theories proliferate exponentially to engage the fundamental questions that drive us to love astronomy in the first place, I can think back to how my life was enriched by the optical shop's camaraderie, and how through it I moved beyond the world of the solitary observer enshrined in that childhood story. Like so many initiatives in fields of lay science today, that experience embodied a principal motivation for all teaching: to inspire the lives of others, and to point the way to new worlds.Richard Fisher ([email protected]) leaches German and chairs the classical-studies program at Lake Forest College near Chicago, Illinois. Adler's optical shop, which first opened in the 1960s, was moved to an off-site location prior to the planetarium's extensive renovations in the early 1990s.