A Responsibility to Awe

by Rebecca Elson

  The following autumn Mike called me into his office to introduce a colleague visiting from Australia, Ken Freeman. He told me he had decided to spend a six month sabbatical in California, and proposed that I spend the six months at Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra, Australia, working with Ken, learning to observe with large telescopes, and collecting data on the Large Magellanic Cloud clusters. (The Large Magellanic Cloud is only visible from the southern hemisphere during the southern summer, a happy circumstance which provided many occasions to escape from the dreary English winters.)

  At Mount Stromlo I lived in a house at the base of the hill where the astronomy department and local telescopes were situated. I often went for walks down a sandy road into a valley behind the house where, at dusk, the distant gum-tree covered hills turned a deep blue, and groups of kangaroos would startle and bound away at my approach. At night, with no city lights nearby, the sky was dazzling; even more so than the skies of northern Canada, because the southern sky has the lion’s share of bright objects. While our northern Milky Way arches away into the hinterland of the Galaxy, the southern Milky Way plunges straight into the Galaxy’s turbulent centre. For the first time I saw the Large Magellanic Cloud itself, a full-moon-sized patch of pale light that looked like a fragment torn out of the Milky Way.

  In the mid-1980s astronomy was in a period of transition. Computers were turning from specialized instruments into ubiquitous tools, and the technology was changing rapidly. In my first computing course at Smith we had learned how to program with punch cards. By the time I began my Ph.D., punch cards had become relics of a past age. Technology for gathering data was also changing rapidly, as sensitised photographic plates were being replaced with electronic detectors whose output could be displayed and manipulated directly with computers.

  Thus, part of my time at Mount Stromlo was spent in a basement room counting stars on photographic plates in order to determine the structure of the star clusters I was studying, and part was spent at the telescopes both at Mount Stromlo and at the large international observatory in the outback 500 miles north, collecting data electronically. I loved observing. I loved the moment at sunset when all the domes would glow orange-pink, and one by one their shutters would open as the observers began their preparations for the night. I loved the way the wind would come up in the night and fill the dark dome, which rattled like rigging, the stars sailing dizzyingly overhead.

  By the time I returned to Cambridge the following summer, Mike had decided to leave to take up a position at the headquarters of the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Not wishing to lose the continuity of my thesis project, I opted to remain his student, and spent several extended periods in Baltimore. It was exciting to move around and see new places, but there were also lonely times, moving again and again to new places where I knew no one. Still, the Space Telescope Institute was a bustling place with the Hubble telescope about to be launched, and it was a good opportunity to get to know, and be known in, the astronomy community.

  All in all my Ph.D. went smoothly along, and three and a half years after arriving in Cambridge (the standard allotment for a British Ph.D.) I delivered my thesis to the Board of Graduate Studies, and processed through the ancient Senate House to kneel at the Chancellor’s feet, be doffed on the head and pronounced, in Latin, Doctor of Philosophy with all the rights and privileges thereof. My years in Cambridge had brought none of the struggle and alienation of UBC, and I felt excited at the prospect of my next move, to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.

  Despite what one might imagine, the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge had never really seemed a bastion of male scientists, at least not the way the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton turned out to be. Of course Cambridge was dominated by men, but apart from a few irksome details (male graduate students were listed by their initials, females were required to list their titles, either Miss or Mrs) that didn’t seem to matter. Princeton on the other hand was irrefutably male, both in the occupants of E-building, where the astronomers worked, and in the way the place was run. In indefinable ways it was alienating. Jokes were made about the female sex. If one didn’t laugh one ‘didn’t have much of a sense of humour’. The only path seemed to be to become bitter and embattled. I preferred to lie low in my office.

  The situation was made worse by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986, eight months before I arrived in Princeton. I had been in Baltimore at the time, and remember the stunned silence in the auditorium where the staff had gathered to watch the shuttle launch on the large screen, and saw instead Challenger cascading Earthwards in ribbons of flame. With the disaster, the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope was delayed, and my reason for going to Princeton, to work with Hubble data, vanished. I found myself in a stronghold not just of men, but of theoreticians, who traditionally hold themselves above observers. Complicated equations would be solved on blackboards, chalk dust flying, in much the way other species might beat their chests or erect gaudy plumage. I withdrew. After three years in Princeton, my career was at a low ebb. The mismatch between my needs and the place had prevented me from forming any real collaborations, and that is a crucial step in becoming integrated into the research community and striking out as a fully-fledged researcher.

  The saving grace of Princeton was a lively co-operative of poets. We met Tuesday evenings, often in my little apartment opposite the Institute, and read and discussed our poems. The contrast between these evenings and the famous Princeton Tuesday lunches, was striking. At the lunches, a sort of high table, made up of the permanent research staff and whichever postdocs were courageous and aggressive enough to claim places, would lead the interrogation of new postdocs and visitors, who were expected, essentially, to demonstrate that they were worthy members of the clique. On more than one occasion results from other institutions were referred to patronisingly as ‘amusing little things’. The poets were far more expansive and congenial, and I enjoyed those evenings immensely. However, the discussions there were also a reminder that, although I loved the unlimited licence to invent, I also loved the sense of exploring not an inner, but an outer world, that was really there, in some objective sense.

  After three years in Princeton, my next step was the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, a kind of Institute for Advanced Studies for women. The atmosphere could not have been more different. All kinds of pursuits (even raising children!) were considered worthy, and the fellows (at all stages in their careers) talked to one another without the barriers imposed by rank. I found myself opening up, relaxing, and reassessing my subject in light of other people’s views of it. People are almost always interested in astronomy. Being introduced, for instance, at parties as an astronomer gives you much better prospects for conversation than being introduced as a mathematician or a physicist. I felt appreciated as a kind of entertainer in the midst of a crowd pursuing serious real-life projects to do with politics, poverty, the status of women.

  However, scientists at the Bunting needed independent affiliations with a local lab, and establishing such a relationship with Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics up the street proved difficult. They felt that since they had not themselves chosen me, they weren’t enthusiastic about supplying the resources of an office and computing facilities. The colleague who came to my rescue, Bill Press, was a member of staff at the Center for Astrophysics whom I had met through his frequent visits to Princeton. Like most of the senior men who have stepped in as mentors for me at crucial moments, he was the father of a daughter.

  By the time my Bunting year finished I was so disenchanted with astronomy, and so far from a world like that of Ms Seitter and Mrs J., that I contemplated quitting (not for the first time, but for the most serious time). I applied for a job teaching in the Harvard Expository Writing programme. There was one last possibility: a postdoctoral position back in the other Cambridge, working with the about to be launched
(four years late) Hubble Space Telescope. The day after I accepted the Expository Writing job, an offer came through to return as a postdoc to Cambridge. I taught for a term at Harvard, a valuable experience, which brought me into contact with a very different crowd. (Staff meetings included such things as readings from novels-in-progress.) Then I returned to Cambridge in the early spring.

  Over the years that followed I finally began to find my voice, to feel at ease in the astronomy community, to feel appreciated for who I was, without having to put up façades and pretences. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in April 1990 amidst great excitement, and then disappointment at the discovery that the mirror had been ground to the wrong shape and was unfocussable. Astronomers using the telescope persevered, applying fancy mathematical algorithms to sharpen up the images (the same technique as might be applied to sharpen up a photo of the licence plate of a distant speeding car). Even with the focus problem, the detail in the images was stunning compared to what was possible from the ground. In 1993 a mission was sent into orbit to install a set of lenses in the telescope to compensate for the distorted optics, and the tedious image processing was no longer necessary. I used the images the telescope was sending back to study the structure and stellar content of our Galaxy, of the Large Magellanic Cloud and its star clusters, and of distant galaxies, presenting the results at conferences in both Europe and North America, and initiating collaborations with people with whom it was a joy to work.

  There are times when the enterprise seems mechanical, when the constraint to pursue the truth seems to suffocate the imagination, and the mysteries of the Universe seem irrelevant to the lives we humans lead down here. But on the whole, understanding the Universe seems a fundamental step in understanding our origins, and in establishing a sense of perspective with respect to space and time that I find comforting. Someone once said to me ‘astronomy is like a big circus tent – there’s room for everyone.’ I feel privileged indeed to be able to spend my days inside a tent with such a dazzling roof.

  Cambridge, England, May 1998

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Some of these poems have appeared in Acumen, Decodings, Orbis, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Chicago, The Rialto, Thumbscrew and US1 Worksheets.

  The essay ‘From Stones to Stars’ was originally prepared for a collection of autobiographical essays by women in science who are alumnae of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College USA, and appears here in advance of publication

  Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ. This new edition published in 2018.

  This new eBook edition first published in 2018.

  On the cover: Jupiter’s northern hemisphere photographed by NASA’s Juno spacecraft in December 2017 (detail). [NASA / JPL-Caltech / SWRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstaedt / Seán Doran.]

  Copyright © Estate of Rebecca Elson 2001, 2018. Editorial matter and selection copyright © Anne Berkeley and Angelo di Cintio 2001, 2018. The right of Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 656 0

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  The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.