Order comes to a plate-glass universe

In a matter of weeks, Jean Mueller and her team of volunteers rearranged the stars, aligned the celestial bodies, and imposed a cosmic logic on the whole mess.

They found the Milky Way in a box and put it back in its proper place. They wiped the dust off the Orion Nebula and hung Orion’s belt back on its cosmic hook. No red giant was too massive; no brown dwarf was too small. Not even comets, trailing their resplendent tails, could shoot across the sky fast enough to escape.

Mueller, along with a team of volunteers, set about the awesome project to clean up the plate archive in the subbasement in Robinson last winter.

“The plate vault was in disarray. It was a mess down there,” says Mueller, who operates the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain. “In recent years, there hadn’t been a lot of attention paid to them.”

The glass plates, large photographic negatives exposed on Palomar’s 48-inch Schmidt telescope (known as the Oschin Telescope since the 1980s), had been accumulating since 1949. Over 15 years, Mueller exposed hundreds of plates herself for a sky
survey. In all, she estimates that some 40,000 plates were produced, and 19,000 of those had made their way to the dim vault in Robinson.

“I knew that it needed to be done right or the plates could be at risk in the future,” Mueller says. So she approached Richard Ellis, the director of the Caltech Optical Observatories, to volunteer her services.

“I asked if I could put together a team to organize and inventory the collection.”

Given the go-ahead, the former USC librarian used her considerable skills to bring order to chaos. Once word got out that help was needed, members of the Mt. Wilson Observatory Association and the L.A. Astronomical Association volunteered to help.

“Everyone who was asked said yes, and everyone stayed on through the end,” Mueller says of her 11 teammates. Over 13 weekends, the volunteers spent more than one thousand hours poring over the stacks, placing plates in protective sleeves, and packing them in boxes. But their time down there wasn’t all drudgery.

Every once in a while, the team would gather around a light box to appreciate the wonders of the cosmos. “People certainly enjoyed looking at Milky Way fields and plates that had the Orion Nebula—it’s very beautiful to look at,” Mueller recalls.

Now that more than 500 boxes of plates have been transported and stored at Palomar, Mueller looks back in wonder. “It was a monumental effort by an extraordinary group of people,” she says. “This was the most incredible volunteer team effort that I’ve ever been involved in.”

All of the volunteers were presented with the gift of having asteroids named after them, compliments of Carolyn Shoemaker, who has discovered more comets than any other individual in history, Mueller says. And her work did not go unnoticed by her boss.

“In recognition of her devotion well beyond the normal call of duty, I arranged for her to visit Keck Observatory and see how things are done at our ‘other’ telescope,” Ellis says. She will spend much of the month of June in Hawaii.
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