Milton Humason: A Mule Driver Measures the Universe

Everyone knows Edwin Hubble - the man with the space telescope named after him, who proved the universe is far vaster than we ever imagined and not only that, it is expanding, too.

Far fewer know Milton Humason: an eighth-grade dropout who started out by driving mule teams up Mount Wilson, hauling supplies to the mountain top observatory and the Hooker Telescope. The scientists there noticed how sharp and meticulous he was and he soon became a janitor, and then worked his way up to Hubble's assistant. Humason did much of the painstaking observational work behind Hubble's Law, measuring the redshifts of 620 galaxies, one faint smudge of light at a time. This is a small tribute to the quiet half of one of the biggest discoveries of the 20th century.
See the Show!

@see_theShow Video out together by Sidestep Studio.

Archival images, courtesy of: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives (Milton Humason); the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution / Mount Wilson; California Historical Society (Wilson Peak pack train, public domain); NASA / ESA / STScI (M101, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field). Markarian's Chain by Stephen Rahn (CC0). Newspaper headlines are typographic recreations of period reporting (incl. The New York Times, Nov. 23, 1924), not original scans. Music: "The Entertainer" (Scott Joplin, 1902, public domain). For educational, historical purposes.

#astronomy #history #space #hubble #miltonhumason #astrophotography #science #mountwilson #galaxies #seetheshow

Видео Milton Humason: A Mule Driver Measures the Universe канала See the Show!