The Wishing Chair Collection

I had imagined that Evans would have a proper observatory in his backyard-a scaled-down version of a Mount Wilson or Palomar, with a sliding domed roof and a mechanized chair that would be a pleasure to maneuver. In fact, he led me not outside but to a crowded storeroom off the kitchen where he keeps his books and papers and where his telescope-a white cylinder that is about the size and shape of a household hot-water tank-rests in a homemade, swiveling plywood mount. When he wishes to observe, he carries them in two trips to a small deck off the kitchen. Between the overhang of the roof and the feathery tops of eucalyptus trees growing up from the slope below, he has only a letter-box view of the sky, but he says it is more than good enough for his purposes. And there, when the skies are clear and the Moon not too bright, he finds his supernovae. The term supernova was coined in the 1930s by a memorably odd astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Switzerland, Zwicky came to the California Institute of Technology in the 1920s and there at once distinguished himself by his abrasive personality and erratic talents ...»