![]() This spiral-shaped cloud was large, bright, and faintly visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy smear of light for those located away from the city lights of Los Angeles. On the night of October 4, 1923, Hubble used the Hooker Telescope to take a 40-minute exposure of one of his favorite nebulae: the Great Nebula in the Andromeda constellation. These nebulae’s spiral shapes suggested that they were rotating, but they otherwise mystified Hubble and other astronomers. Hubble was interested in cracking the code of nebulae, particularly spiral nebulae. But nearly a century later, little more was known about them. Using his mammoth telescope in rural Ireland in the mid-19th century, the adventurous amateur astronomer William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse, had first sketched nebulae with spiral structures that looked like faintly glowing whirlpool patterns. No one fully understood these nebulae, although they were suspected to be the birthplaces of stars. ![]() He relished using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope to study his favorite subject, the fuzzy nebulae - mysterious, glowing gas clouds that appeared scattered across the sky. Hubble was now in his fourth year as a staff astronomer at Mount Wilson. He had embarked on a career in astronomy only after returning to school at the age of 25 to pursue a Ph.D. Originally from Missouri, Edwin Powell Hubble had moved to Illinois, graduated from the University of Chicago, and then earned a master’s degree as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. On October 4, 1923, in the midst of this peculiar Western paradise, a brash young astronomer left his Pasadena house and trekked up to the Mount Wilson Observatory, not far from Los Angeles, to the 100-inch Hooker Telescope - at the time the largest telescope in the world. One big question floated out there: How big is eternity? Is creation limitless? Soon, Los Angeles would play a pivotal role in defining the distance scale of the universe. ![]() People had looked at the brightest galaxies in the sky - the fuzzy patches in Andromeda and the Magellanic Clouds in the Southern Hemisphere - but no one yet understood exactly what they were. No one yet knew the size and scope of the universe. And a young cartoonist named Walt Disney arrived in town with $40 in his pocket.ĭespite the area’s forward-looking involvement in science and technology, it was a primitive time. The Hollywood Bowl had recently opened for concert performances. Amelia Earhart took periodic flying lessons in the area. At the California Institute of Technology, an American physicist, Robert Millikan, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his measurement of the charge carried by a single proton or electron (the fundamental particles) and for work on the photoelectric effect, including his observation that many metals emit electrons when they are struck by light. In 1923, Los Angeles had a population of 1 million - just one-quarter of its present size - and the city was in the midst of explosive growth. Waves crashed along the beach at Santa Monica, vast stands of forest speckled the mountains north of the city, and a mesmerizing network of roads crisscrossed here and there.
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