First Light - Hardcover

Richard Preston

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0356188434 ISBN 13: 9780356188430

Publisher: LITTLE BROWN, 1991

Synopsis

The author writes in this book about the lives and work of astronomers. He spent a year visiting Palomar Mountain in southern California where he learned how astronomers explore the infinite deep. Since the Hale Telescope at Palomar opened its shutter to "first light" in 1949, the observatory has been a mecca for generations of astronomers and remains to this day the largest working optical telescope in the world. The book provides portraits of characters as diverse and eccentric as James Gunn, a nearsighted gadgeteer who builds instruments for the Hale Telescope from junk parts and Juan Carrasco a former barber from Texas who is the only person allowed to move the "big eye" across the sky.

About this title

Review

"There is a saying among astronomers that five billion people concern themselves with the surface of the Earth, and ten thousand with everything else," writes Richard Preston, best-selling author of The Hot Zone. And if you think these professional stargazers spend most of their time serenely peering into the night sky, guess again. Today's astronomers are world-class gadgeteers who scurry about giant (and often frigid) observatories tinkering with the mechanical and electronic tools of their trade. In First Light, they tangle with the Hale Telescope, one of the world's oldest and largest. This beautifully written book is highly recommended for anybody interested in astronomy.

From the Publisher

"Remarkably readable and illuminating....Beautifully depicts astronomers' deepened understanding of earth as the merest speck in time and space."
--The New York Times Book Review

"This is Preston's best book, and it is the best book ever written about astronomers and the things they do. The science is accurate, the portraits of the human characters are true to life, and the story whizzes along like a ride on a roller-coaster."
--Freeman Dyson

"Preston is a master storyteller, pure and simple. When he turns his talents to science writing, the result is spellbinding. First Light gives a novelist's feeling for the scientific enterprise and its characters."
--Alan Lightman

"I love First Light more than any book of its kind. It's the only book I've ever studied to learn what makes it so hypnotically absorbing. I've not yet unlocked its secrets, but whatever Richard Preston does to breathe life into his world of astronomers and their mountaintop machinery, his gifts transcend mere talent."
--Robert Kanigel

"First Light was Richard Preston's bright first light, now renewed. All the intelligence and brio that would blaze from The Hot Zone was there all along. Read First Light--you'll see stars!"
--Richard Rhodes

"First Light is first of all a love letter to the Palomar Observatory and to a handful of astronomers and civilians who are using it to plumb a few of the details of our situation here in the universe. It is one of the finest accounts of scientists at work that I have read. Most writers say they want their books to read like a novel, but Preston actually delivers."
--Dennis Overbye

Edition details

• Publisher: LITTLE BROWN
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0356188434
• ISBN 13: 9780356188430
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272