the immortal fire within

I finished reading The Immortal Fire Within, a fine biography of E.E. Barnard by William Sheehan.  Barnard is, as my avatar would indicate, something of a hero of mine.  His drive to observe and see and experience the universe is something I aspire to.  I wanted to preserve some passages from the book here before I return it to the library:

On his first light with his beloved 5-inch Byrne refractor, his first serious telescope, for which he paid two-thirds of his annual salary to acquire:

The first clear night after receiving my large telescope, I sat out on the roof of a three story house all night long, surrounded by ice and snow, the night being bitterly cold.  After exploring the wonders of the moon until it sank from view beneath the western horizon my telescope sought the Milky Way.  Here amid the splendors of that mighty zone of stars, I spent hour after hour sweeping among its marvelous fields of glittering suns, never wearying of the wonders constantly presented with each movement of the telescope, but gaining additional enthusiasm as the night drew apace.  Nor did I forget the many double stars and clusters I had learned with my smaller instrument for they were each examined and I wondered at the beautiful contrasts of color in some of the binary systems and the myriads of stars revealed in the clusters that I had but dimly seen before with that small telescope.  But from these lesser lights my telescope constantly swung back to the Milky Way, again to gaze on the 'broad and ample road where dust is stars.'  So enraptured was I with these glimpses of the Creator's works that I heeded not the cold nor the loneliness of the night.  And when the approaching dawn began to whiten the eastern skies, I sought out the great planet Jupiter, then only just emerging from the solar rays, and beheld with rapture his four bright moons and vast belt system.  But when the dawn had paled each stellar fire the coldness of the night forcibly impressed itself upon me and I retired from the field of glory....

This makes me think of my first light with the 12.5-inch.  The first think I looked at, in the twilight, was Jupiter.  I was shocked to see a small black dot among the belts of the planet: Io was making a shadow transit at that moment.  I was hooked.

The Byrne refractor was sold to USC when Barnard was short of funds.  I wonder where it is now?

***

On comet sweeping: "Needless to say, such work could be tiring and extremely discouraging.  Nevertheless, even unsuccessful sweeping was not without its consolations.  Above all, Barnard later noted, the comet-seeker was 'the only astronomer who thoroughly knows the heavens; for he must examine every portion of it time and time again...Everything is interesting and numberless objects are beautiful in the extreme.  There is nothing commonplace in the sky.'"

***

Writing in a friend's autograph book, with a sketch of Great Comet of 1882, which had just passed:

I had intended writing a short tale for your album but feeling my inability to do so, I have drawn one belonging to a friend of mine, which stretched halfway from the sun to the earth.  May your happiness be as long as the tail herewith presented.  

I can not wish that you may live to again see this wanderer, for it will not come back to us until many thousand years have passed, but I can and do wish that your life may always be as beautiful as that stranger, now gone.  Sincerely yours, E.E. Barnard.

***

One of Barnard's comets will come back in 2019; I wish to be the one to recover it.  "He found another, 1889 III, in Andromeda with the 6 1/2 inch equatorial on June 24.  It was also faint, but proved to have a short period of only 130 years, so that it is expected to return again in 2019.  It is, incidentally, the only one of Barnard's many comets which is likely to be observed again -- all the rest have been lost or will not return for thousands of years.

***

On Barnard's observation of Iapetus eclipsed by Saturn's rings: "The real story of November 1-2, 1889 is that the glory that night went not to the high and mighty -- the great telescope and the powerful director -- but to the humble 12-inch and the junior astronomer faithful at his post.  That night Barnard and his telescope did well.  According to his own frank assessment: 'The observations of that eclipse with the 12-inch equatorial have given us more information about the crape ring of Saturn, perhaps, than could possibly have been obtained by a hundred years of ordinary observing.'"

***

On globular clusters:  "There is no class of objects in the heavens, unless it is the planetary nebulae, that shows the power of a great telescope better than the great globular clusters...No photograph, though it may show more stars, can begin to give one an idea of their beauty.  The photograph is at best a dead copy of the original.  The fire and life give by the myriads of stars are lacking in any picture except that seen in the telescope itself."