“THERE’S NO REASON” Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discover’d: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets (London: Timothy Childe, 1698; Digitized by Utrecht University).
A HAZE OF COLOR This is known as chromatic aberration.
THIRTY-FIVE TIMES Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (London: William and John Innys at the West End of St. Paul’s, 1721), p. 91.
WITHIN A CENTURY In the meantime, with some desperation, astronomers were trying to mitigate the problem of chromatic aberration with increasingly long refracting telescopes. Huygens tried dispensing with the telescopic tube altogether, mounting a lens on a high mast, and controlling it by means of a guy wire tethered to the eyepiece holder near the ground. An assistant would hold out a lantern to illuminate the lens while Huygens searched for its reflection and adjusted the focus. Huygens experimented with “aerial” telescopes that were 37, 52, and 64 meters in length. They took ages to align and were awash in stray light, and despite the extraordinary lengths to which he went, his observations of Mars did not improve significantly. Cassini, meanwhile, was setting up 30- and 41-meter focal-length telescopes, mounted atop an old wooden tower. The tower was equipped with a stairway and a balcony around the top to prevent his assistants from falling off in the darkness. See: Sheehan, The Planet Mars, pp. 24–26.
ENABLING UNPRECEDENTED ENLARGEMENTS It was not until 1722 that John Hadley produced a reflector that was as good as Huygens’s aerial telescopes. By then the refractor was on the verge of making a comeback, with the discovery of achromatic lenses. These compound lenses, where a concave lens of flint glass was used in combination with a convex lens of crown glass, allowed the chromatic aberration produced by one lens to be largely compensated for by the other (at least within a certain range of wavelengths, including the yellow light where the eye is most sensitive). Good achromatic lenses were coming into use by the middle of the eighteenth century, but they were expensive, and it was their expense that led Herschel to build reflectors.
YOUNGER SISTER, CAROLINE Caroline was also a highly accomplished astronomer. She was an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society and was presented with a Gold Medal for Science at the age of 96 by the king of Prussia.
WHITE POLAR CAPS Giovanni Cassini and Christian Huygens also observed polar caps.
“CLOUDS AND VAPORS” William Herschel, quoted in The New Mars: The Discoveries of Mariner 9, p. 2.
“SIMILAR TO OUR OWN” William Herschel, quoted in Chris Impey and Holly Henry, Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 15.
“LOOKING AT A PLANET” Murray, interviewed by Prud’homme, p. 162.
VIA TELETYPE Baggett, The Changing Face of Mars.
WERE LIKE PEARLS Aspaturian, “Interview with Robert Leighton,” p. 103.
THE DATA RATE Baggett, The Changing Face of Mars.
EIGHT HOURS “ To Mars: The Odyssey of Mariner 4,” p. 30.
HAD DECIDED TO RELAY Baggett, The Changing Face of Mars.
CONTEST OF SORTS Baggett, The Changing Face of Mars.
GRUMM POPPED OVER Dan Goods, “First TV Image of Mars,” DirectedPlay.com.
VIDIMUS ET ADMIRATI SUMUS Brandon A. Evans, “What Was in the News on July 23, 1965?” The Criterion, online edition (July 24, 2015); Latin translation courtesy of Charlayne Allan.
STREAKS ACROSS THE FRAME AP, UPI, and L.A. Times–Washington Post dispatches; “Mariner 4 Shot Shows Mars Hills,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky., July 16, 1965).
“THE RESOLUTION WAS AWFUL” John Casani, personal interview by Sarah Johnson (Pasadena, Calif.; Aug. 6, 2015).
“JACK, YOU AND I” James, In High Regard, p. 456.
“IT’S THE MOON” Haynes, personal interview by Johnson.
HIS INAUGURAL SPEECH Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s Inaugural Address, January 20, 1965,” Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, eds., The American Presidency Project (University of California, Santa Barbara).
IN THE EAST ROOM Lyndon B. Johnson, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965 (Best Books, 1965), pp. 805–806.
“A PROFOUND FACT” Robert B. Leighton, “Mariner 4 Press Conference,” eFootage.com (July 29, 1965).
“IT MAY BE” Johnson, Public Papers of the Presidents, pp. 805–806; Baggett, The Changing Face of Mars.
INSTRUMENTS ALSO REVEALED “Mariner 4,” NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive, NSSDCA/COSPAR ID: 1964-077A.
“CRATERS? WHY DIDN’T WE THINK” Oliver Morton, Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World (New York: Picador, 2002), p. 73.
“A DEAD PLANET” “The Dead Planet,” The New York Times (July 30, 1965).
Chapter 2: The Light that Shifts
IN THE IMAGE “Mariner 4’s First Picture Clearly Showing Craters on Mars,” NASA, JPL/Caltech (1965).
OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE Betsy Mason, “What Mars Maps Got Right (and Wrong) Through Time,” National Geographic (Oct. 16, 2016).
PEACH AND GRAY Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, “Mars: MEC-1 Prototype,” Library of Congress (1965).
SIX IN ALL Ibid.
PULL-APART ORIGIN Gregory A. Davis, “2009 Penrose Medal Presented to B. Clark Burchfiel, Citation by Gregory A. Davis,” The Geological Society of America (2009).
SHILLING A MILE Beryl Markham, West with the Night: A Memoir (New York: North Point Press, 2013), p. 198.
HEMINGWAY CALLED THE BOOK Diane Ackerman, “A High Life and a Wild One,” The New York Times (Aug. 23, 1987).
LADISLAUS DE ALMÁSY Ondaatje’s protagonist was inspired by the historical figure László Almásy. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 16.
SHEEN POTENTIALLY LINKED The mechanism for the formation of desert varnish remains a topic of debate; see: Naama Lang-Yona, et al., “Insights into Microbial Involvement in Desert Varnish Formation Retrieved from Metagenomic Analysis,” Environmental Microbiology Reports, 10, no. 3 (June 2018), pp. 264–271; Phil Berardelli, “Solving the Mystery of Desert Varnish,” Science (July 7, 2006).
“FACE TO FACE WITH A HATCHERY” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Boston: Harcourt, 2002), p. 111.
“SEIZED WITH VERTIGO” Ibid.
THE MARS PLANNING MAP I first discovered the map through Emily Lakdawalla’s wonderful blog post, “Mapping Mars, Now and in History,” The Planetary Society (Feb. 26, 2009). This map and other fascinating photos, videos, artwork, diagrams, and amateur-processed space images can be found in the Planetary Society’s online Bruce Murray Space Image Library.
DISCOVERED TWO MOONS The astronomer was Asaph Hall. George William Hill, Biographical Memoir of Asaph Hall, 1829–1907 (Washington, D.C.: The National Academy of Sciences, 1908), pp. 262–263.
SCHIAPARELLI’S TELESCOPE The Brera Observatory in Milan was an old observatory whose equipment was largely antiquated when Schiaparelli arrived. However, a close associate of one of the king of Italy’s ministers, who had studied engineering with Schiaparelli at the University of Turin, persuaded the Italian parliament to fund a new telescope. It was delivered in 1875. Schiaparelli’s first priority was to use it to observe double stars, for which it was very well suited.
HIS NOTEBOOK Agnese Mandrino, et al., “Ed ecco Marte!” Di Pane e Di Stelle (April 5, 2010); G.V. Schiaparelli, “First observations of Mars: Thursday, August 23, 1877,” Notebook Entry, Historical Archive of the Astronomical Observatory of Brera, Box 403: 1 and Box 407: 1.
TWO CARTOON HANDS R. A. Proctor, “Proctor’s Mars Maps (1865–1892),” Planetary Maps (Jan. 29, 2016).
A TINY MICROMETER Schiaparelli developed a great deal of
experience using a micrometer to measure double stars as a student of Otto Wilhelm Struve and Johann Encke (in the decades between the time Schiaparelli began observing double stars and the time he gave up, owing to failing eyesight, he made thousands of double-star measurements).
PRETERNATURALLY SHARP Schiaparelli was also color-blind, meaning that he was probably more sensitive to slight gradations of intensity of the markings such as those between boundaries of different tone.
“SALTIER THE WATER” David A. Weintraub, Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go (Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 91.
OF THESE “CANALI” Schiaparelli borrowed the term “canali” from another Italian astronomer, who had dubbed a dark space the “Atlantic Canale” some fifteen years earlier, for it seemed to separate two bright continents.
MIDDLE OF A LANDMASS Weintraub, Life on Mars, p. 93.
CAMILLE FLAMMARION Flammarion was also a mystic. In the late Victorian Era, as intellectual life was wresting itself from the authority of the church, his blend of science and spiritualism was a peculiar, ephemeral compromise. Flammarion made no distinction between life after death and life on other worlds within the observable universe. He thought of humans as “citizens of the sky.” He believed that human souls passed from planet to planet and that telepathy was “as much a fact as London, Sirius, and oxygen.” Camille Flammarion, Camille Flammarion’s The Planet Mars, trans. Patrick Moore (New York: Springer, 2014); Robert Crossley, “Mars and the Paranormal,” in Imagining Mars: A Literary History, (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), pp. 129–148.
WORD SIMPLY MEANT George Basalla, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (Oxford University, 2006), pp. 56–62.
MEANDER LIKE STREAMS Flammarion, Camille Flammarion’s The Planet Mars, pp. 373–382, 505–509.
ODDLY GEOMETRIC In 1882, Schiaparelli described the strange phenomenon of gemination, when one canal was suddenly joined by another running in parallel alongside it, like a set of railroad tracks. Schiaparelli generally believed bright areas were deserts, dark areas were seas, and half-toned areas were likely shallow seas or marshes. He also included the terms “island, isthmus, strait, channel, peninsula, cape, etc.” In 1878, he underscored, “Our map…includes a complete system of geographical names which they who wish to avoid prejudice concerning the nature of the features on the planet may regard as a mere artifice to assist the memory and abbreviate the descriptions. After all, we speak in a similar way of the maria of the Moon, knowing full well that they do not consist of liquid masses. If we understand the matter in this way, the names I have adopted will do no harm….” William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara, Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001), pp. 111–112; G. V. Schiaparelli, Astronomical and Physical Observations of the Axis of Rotation and the Topography of the Planet Mars: First Memoir, 1877–1878 (San Francisco: Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers Monograph Number 5, 1994).
COMPLETED IN 1825 Jonathan Pearson, “Erie Canal Timeline,” Union College (2003).
OPENED IN 1869 Charles Gordon Smith and William B. Fisher, “Suez Canal,” Encyclopedia Britannica (updated Feb. 13, 2019).
WORK IN PANAMA Enrique Chaves, et al., “French Panama Canal Failure (1881–1889),” The Panama Canal: A Triumph of American Medicine, The University of Kansas Medical Center (March 13, 2019).
“HABITATION OF MARS” Flammarion, Camille Flammarion’s The Planet Mars, pp. 373–382, 512.
“MAN OF MOODS” Louise Leonard, Percival Lowell, An Afterglow (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1921), p. 15.
FASTEST POLO PONIES , Ibid., p. 29.
HERMIT AT HEART Ibid., pp. 19–20.
A CHRISTMAS GIFT William Sheehan, The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), p. 104.
AN 1890 ARTICLE William H. Pickering, “Visual Observations of the Surface of Mars,” Sidereal Messenger, 9 (1890), pp. 369–370.
ASTRONOMICAL VANTAGE POINTS Jordan D. Marché II, “Pickering, William Henry,” in T. Hockley, et al., eds., The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (New York: Springer, 2007).
“SMOKE OF MEN” Percival Lowell, “Our Solar System,” Popular Astronomy, 24 (1916), p. 419.
“BEST PROCURABLE AIR” Leonard, Percival Lowell, An Afterglow, p. 38. To select a location for the observatory, Lowell sent Andrew Ellicott Douglass, who had accompanied Pickering to Peru, ahead of him to Arizona in April of 1894. Armed with Lowell’s fifteen-centimeter refractor, Douglass tested the seeing conditions at various sites. Since he only spent one or two days at any particular site, it was a completely unscientific study, and the decision to place the observatory on the mesa at Flagstaff was rather arbitrary. But Lowell was champing at the bit, and he decided that the altitude was an advantage (Douglass later said that Flagstaff also had the best saloons). In retrospect, sites in southern Arizona, especially around Tucson, would have been better—as Douglass later learned when he established the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory.
PICKERING DESIGNED Kevin S. Schindler, “100 Years of Good Seeing: The History of the 24-Inch Clark Telescope,” Lowell Observatory (July 1996; revised September 1998), p. 1.
BY RAIL The fact that Flagstaff lay on a major rail line was another advantage in the siting of the facility.
GROUND WAS BROKEN Schindler, “100 Years of Good Seeing,” p. 1.
FIRST OBSERVATIONS The first observations were made using borrowed telescopes, a forty-five-centimeter Brashear refractor and a thirty-centimeter Clark refractor.
SOON ACQUIRED The forty-five-centimeter Clark telescope arrived in July 1896.
A KITCHEN CHAIR Eric Betz, “Clark Telescope Going Dark,” Arizona Daily Sun (Dec. 27, 2013).
“BUT ONE WATCHER” Leonard, Percival Lowell, An Afterglow, p. 27.
DOZENS MORE CANALS Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906).
“ALL-ENGROSSING MARTIAN PURSUIT” Percival Lowell, Mars (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895), p. 128.
IN ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND GERMAN Leonard, Percival Lowell, An Afterglow, p. 27.
THE BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT Ibid., pp. 25–27.
ON THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 66.
“SO SADLY TYPIFIED” Percival Lowell, “Mars (Part IV),” The Atlantic (Aug. 1895).
“THE OUTCOME IS DOUBTLESS YET” Percival Lowell, Mars as the Abode of Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1908), p. 135.
MOSTLY IN FOREIGN PERIODICALS As described in William H. Pickering, Mars (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1921), p. 132. It should be noted that doubts were also expressed by some American astronomers, like Edward Emerson Barnard, who trained the great Lick ninety-one-centimeter refractor at Mount Hamilton, near San Jose, California, on Mars at the same moment that Lowell was cutting his teeth with the forty-five-centimeter refractor at Flagstaff (and before Lowell had published his theory of intelligent life on the planet). “I have been watching and drawing the surface of Mars,” Barnard wrote to a colleague. “To save my soul I can’t believe in the canals as Schiaparelli draws them….I verily believe—for all the verifications—that the canals…are a fallacy and that they will be so proved before many oppositions are past.” William Sheehan, The Immortal Fire Within: The Life and Work of Edward Emerson Barnard (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 246.
A BRITISH SOLAR ASTRONOMER The astronomer was Edward Walter Maunder, who worked at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
TO CHALLENGE LOWELL Maunder was joined in his skepticism of Lowell by Barnard as well as by Vincenzo Cerulli, who operated a private observatory equipped with a thirty-nine-centimeter refractor near Teramo, Italy. Cerulli had sketched canals with the be
st of them until, on January 4, 1897, he noticed, in moments of “perfect definition [in which] Mars appeared perfectly free from undulation,” that one of the canals, the Lethes, suddenly “lost its form of a line and altered itself into a complex and indecipherable system of minute patches.” Henceforth he argued that the canals were mere tricks of the eye, formed when small irregular detached details were visualized in unsteady air or were present at the threshold of resolvability. Sheehan, The Planet Mars, p. 125.
A GROUP OF SCHOOLBOYS J. E. Evans and E. W. Maunder, “Experiments as to the Actuality of the ‘Canals’ Observed on Mars,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 63 (1903), pp. 488–499.
COUNTERED THAT LINEAR FEATURES Lowell was also unimpressed with the testimony of the students in a “reform school.”
TAKEN ABACK The most prominent early member of Lowell’s staff, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, who had been with the observatory from its founding, had also turned skeptical; Douglass was dismissed in 1901 but landed on his feet, going on to found the astronomy department at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
LOWELL TURNED TO PHOTOGRAPHY K. Maria D. Lane, “Mapping the Mars Canal Mania: Cartographic Projection and the Creation of a Popular Icon,” Imago Mundi, 58: 2 (2006), pp. 198–211.
REVEALED NEW MOONS Following the discovery of Phoebe by William Pickering in 1899, Himalia and Elara, two new moons of Jupiter, were discovered by photography in 1904 and 1905.
TOOK ON THE CHALLENGE The assistant was Carl O. Lampland, who designed several astronomical cameras. Instead of traveling to the Andes, he remained in Flagstaff for the 1907 opposition to conduct similar imaging of Mars.
DISTRIBUTED THEM WIDELY Schiaparelli, when informed of the accomplishment, excitedly wrote to Lowell, “I should never have believed it possible.”
FOLLOWED SUIT IN 1906 At the meeting in June of that year, President A.C.D. Crommelin went on to convey that “it seemed to him clear that the photographs could hardly be an illusion as to the existence of some approximately linear markings there.” See: Lane, “Mapping the Mars Canal Mania,” p. 205; “Report of the Meeting of the Association, Held on June 20, 1906, at Sion College, Victoria Embankment,” Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 16, no. 9 (1906), p. 333.
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