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DISNEY:
And
so, we spent the rest of the night, then, trying to measure exactly where
the pulses were coming from. It really was very close to Baade's Star, but
it might have been one of two stars in the middle of the Nebula. And so
we sent off a telegram, then, to the International Astronomical Union, which
is a place where you tell a very exciting discovery which you want confirmed
immediately. We sent it off to them, and they sent it to all observatories
around the world.
Well, what was really worrying us is we couldn't eliminate the possibility
that, which—you know, we didn't know really—which of the two stars
in the middle of the Nebula was the pulsar. We knew it was one of them,
we couldn't be absolutely sure. And to do that, we really needed a bigger
telescope. And we realized now that, having sent this telegram off, there'd
be a lot of people working on the pulsar. And indeed, it turned out that
the people at Kitt Peak National Observatory itself, on the very same mountain,
were going to work on it the following night, too.
There was a lot of interesting stuff to be
done. And we weren't sure really, how we were going to do any of it, because
we didn't have the right telescope. Well, we came to the conclusion that
if we were going to find out which star it was, we were going to need a
smaller diaphragm—that's a very small thing which can discriminate
between one bit of the sky and the other—and we had to do it before
the next evening.
So I remember, we spent the whole day with some kitchen tinfoil from
the kitchen trying to make a tiny little hole in this thing, about a tenth
of a millimeter square. We finally succeeded in doing this, to everyone's
amazement. We had—I can remember all four of us working on it, John,
Don, Bob McCallister, and myself— and we had a microscope, which we'd
found somewhere in the building. And we were looking through this microscope—this
tiny piece of kitchen tinfoil—working with pairs of tweezers and razor
blades and so on. And when the guy who was making the actual cuts—I
think John was actually doing the brain surgery— everybody held their
breath tight after he drew a line, or cut a line, in the tinfoil. But anyway,
around about 5 o'clock we finally had the diaphragm, which we gingerly placed
into the telescope.
And by this time, we'd had several phone calls from people, either
congratulating us, or asking questions about the pulsar. We knew
they were all going to work on it, so we felt this tremendous rush
to get this thing and prove which star it was. It was kind of a race,
you see.
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