A night in the life of a professional stargazer
A fascination with the stars is part of our human nature, but studying them is a complex task. (Pexels/)The following is an excerpt adapted from The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque.“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”This phrase, repeated by weary IT specialists the world over, had possibly never prompted such horror. First of all, it was one in the morning, and I was sitting in a chilly control room on top of the highest mountain in Hawaii. I was nearly fourteen thousand feet above sea level, twenty-four years old, and desperately fighting through sleep and oxygen deprivation to salvage several hard-won hours of PhD thesis research time on a piece of broken equipment.Second, the equipment in question was the Subaru Telescope, a 630-ton beast housed one floor above my head in a fourteen-story dome. It cost $47,000 per night...