These Astronomical Glass Plates Made History
On a clear Christmas morning atop Mount Wilson, before the first tentacles of dawn struck the Los Angeles sprawl 5,700 feet below, George Willis Ritchey was capturing the most spectacular view of the “Great Nebula of Orion” anyone had ever seen. For close to four hours, he had been standing at the base of an enormous, steel-framed telescope, making minute adjustments as the machine tracked the nebula across the night sky.
The year was 1908, and the 60-inch reflector, which Ritchey had engineered and newly built, was the largest and most powerful in the world. As its huge curved mirror collected the nebular light, the incoming photons slowly exposed the emulsion on a photographic glass plate roughly the size of an iPad. Later, an assistant would develop the negative and label it “Ri-0”—the inaugural scientific image from Ritchey’s state-of-the-art scope.
