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Posted on 08/12/2008 11:44:41 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
From a swivel chair in the basement of the astronomy department at the University of California, Berkeley, he's directing the world's largest functioning telescope, on Hawaii's 14,000-foot Mauna Kea volcano. Dr. Marcy's remote-controlled system of interconnected computers, screens, and a real-time audiovideo connection shows him what the telescope is "seeing" -- and it's not the twinkling light of a distant star. Rather, the screens fill with the spectrum of colors that starlight produces. To the untrained eye, it's no more than a blotch of 1960s psychedelia.
Marcy is a planet hunter, a kind of Indiana Jones of the astronomy world -- supposing Jones had been armed with millions of dollars' worth of stargazing technology instead of a whip and searched galaxies rather than jungles.
An astronomy professor at UC Berkeley, clad tonight in a Hawaiian shirt in homage to the telescope's homeland, he has the rare privilege of 10 consecutive nights on the Keck, during which he's searching for planets beyond our solar system...
Marcy has been searching for these "extrasolar planets" longer than just about anyone else in the field, and his success has been, well, astronomical. He and his team have found nearly 150 planets so far -- more than any other astronomer... Marcy began searching for extrasolar planets in 1983, a choice that was actually born of failure. He was halfway through a two-year fellowship, toiling on a subject having nothing to do with planets, when a prominent Harvard astronomer wrote that his work was all wrong. Marcy was devastated...
(Excerpt) Read more at features.csmonitor.com ...
the search result leads with the topic I posted just a little while ago.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2060595/posts
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