Echoes In Time

Walter watched the night sky as a hobby and a release from the rigors of the work-a-day world. More accurately, he took pictures of it. He, and a handful of other amateur astronomers in the United States and other countries, doggedly scanned the night sky with their telescopes looking for asteroids. Not just any asteroid, but a special class of objects called Apollos - chunks of stone, nickel-iron and ice that slipped inside the orbit of earth.

Every clear night Walter pointed his 10" Schmidt Cassegerian wide-field telescope through the sliding dome of the backyard observatory and aligned the ultra precise, microprocessor drive. Occasionally he would sample a few objects of unusual interest or beauty, but the alarm clock he always brought with him would sound and he would, sometimes reluctantly, load the telescope mounted camera with film and begin his search for Apollos.

Observing the whole sky was an impossible task for a single observer, especially when looking for special objects like asteroids. Walter belonged to a small group of Apollo watchers that worked out a scheme for dividing the dome of the sky into segments. Each member of the group drew a sky segment out of a hat, generally near the ecliptic the region most likely to contain asteroids.

Walter's current sector was programmed into the computer that controlled the tracking drive. A single keystroke would automatically slew the telescope to the upper corner of the segment, then begin to step through a set of points that systematically provided coverage of "his" segment. The computer also opened and closed the camera's shutter for proper exposure and advanced the film for overlapping exposures.

Of the thousands of known asteroids, a few hundred crossed inside earth's orbit. The relatively small number crossing inside the earth’s orbit made finding one that was new and getting credit for it was very rare. The remote possibility of discovering an Apollo and meeting the stringent rules to merit the distinction of a new discovery never dampened his interest in the least. To him, and other amateur skywatchers who labored diligently and without pay, finding an authentic new Apollo was a coveted reward for the loss of sleep and the long, often cold nights and physical discomforts.

Walter transferred the rolls of exposed film to his basement darkroom. There he stored them in a small refrigerator until the following evening. After dinner the next day Walter would develop the film exposed the previous night, examine the negatives, and make notations in his journal. If he found any trace of an asteroid, he would usually make a more lengthy entry, especially if his film contained a known Apollo.

Walter's hobby required a high level of diligence and concentration, but he never thought of it as real work. The only part of his hobby that caused his concentration to flag was the minute examination of the negatives of the previous night's exposures. Sometimes his thoughts would wander, and his eyelids sagged when he should have concentrated his attention on the film images.

On this particular evening, weariness crept up on him near the end of his hunt. Walter was about to turn out the light box and file the last negative when, casually, he sat back, rubbed his eyes and scanned the negative one last time, congratulating himself on the quality and the sharpness of the exposure, a technique that was the product of considerable effort.

He blinked, like a machinist who found a burr on a fine piece of lath work. His practiced eye noticed a dot that seemed out of place, sensing something he had missed more than actually seeing it. He picked up the loupe next to the viewing box and screwed it into his eye. He still couldn't decide if he was imagining things or not. Yes, there was something in the lower quadrant. An oddly shaped dot that didn't look quite right.

The identity of the suspicious spot eluded him. He pulled down his big magnifier and scrutinized the image, trying to interpret the message it conveyed. Under magnification the dot appeared slightly elongated, neither a point source of a star or the pencil thin line that usually characterized the track of an asteroid. Walter turned on his computer. While it booted up, he moved the negative to the small coordinate plotter, aligned the film, and centered the cross hairs of the mouse on the object.

On the computer keyboard, he typed in CD\STARTRAK to bring up the program that would record the position of the object. When the program was on the line, he clicked in the object's position with the mouse. The program said the object wasn't a background star or a planet. That was a bit more exciting so he keyed the "calc" icon at the top of the screen.

He stepped through the protocol for the record of known asteroid orbits. A single position would not generate new orbital data, but the process would allow the program to search the existing orbital records. Any known object with the same coordinates for the time and date of the exposure automatically appeared on the screen. This was a trick of modern computer technology that eliminated years of manual searching, something well beyond the capabilities of amateur astronomers like Walter.

The computer muttered to itself then disclosed that, at least in the records in the working file and hard disk, there were no objects that matched the coordinates of the mysterious dot for the time and coordinates of the object. Walter's interest level rose by several degrees and he forgot being tired.

If the object on the negative wasn't a known asteroid it might be a new one, and a chance for a level of esoteric fame among his peers. If it was an Apollo, it would be the crowning achievement of everything he had put into his hobby so far. Still, it wasn't time to gloat yet. He brought on line his compact disk library of orbital data for all known asteroids and comets and let the machine digest that fat meal of data. Still no matches. His heart raced.