“It was a great way to get to know each other,” Carolyn recalled of that summer. Gene was passionate about Earth as a world, with its long and beautiful history carefully written in pages of rock. Carolyn was enthralled by how Gene brought geology to life. On a field trip with Gene during the summer of 1952, just after their marriage, Gene gave Carolyn a new experience with geology. The bribe paid off: Richard’s wedding led to various dates between Carolyn and Gene, including camping and geological field trips, and ultimately a 1951 wedding. Richard had to bribe her to spend time with Gene at the wedding by offering to give her a tablecloth from Guatemala. Carolyn resisted this effort, and did again when Gene served as best man at Richard’s wedding two years later. She had no interest in science and indeed found her geology course boring and frustrating.Īfter her brother Richard graduated from Caltech in 1948, Carolyn’s mother tried to act as matchmaker for her and Richard’s roommate, a young geologist named Gene Shoemaker. She grew up in Chico, California, and attended what is now California State University, Chico. A Latecomer to AstronomyĬarolyn Jean Spellmann was born on June 24, 1929, in Gallup, New Mexico. “That might just be because,” I admitted, “you’ve just been had.”Īt that instant, a long and close friendship began that would stretch on for more than 30 years. Not quite ready to give up on the joke, I added, “We simply take a gigantic pair of scissors, with a curve in them, to cut the strips of film.”Ĭarolyn looked up for a moment, then said, “David, I have the feeling that I’ve just been had.” “David, it’s not going to work,” she said. How am I going to tell this enthusiastic person, Carolyn thought to herself, that his idea is stupid and worthless? I could cut them into pieces to form the circular shape of the large pieces of film, I said, then Scotch-tape them together to fit them into the large film holder. However, I added that I had brought along some spare rolls of ordinary 35-mm black-and-white film. When I brought up the next film holder with its large piece of Kodak 4416 hypersensitized film, I told her that this would be the last film. “We didn’t expect to be moving this efficiently.” “We may even run out of film,” Carolyn suggested. By the second night, however, the observations were moving along quite well. The instrument was the first Schmidt camera ever used in the United States, and my first night with it was rather difficult, as I did not know much about how the camera was supposed to operate. In 1989, Carolyn invited me to join her for a two-night observing run at Palomar Mountain’s oldest telescope, the 18-inch Schmidt camera. I had the great privilege of knowing Carolyn for more than three decades. It was quite an accomplishment for Carolyn, who died on August 13th this year at the age of 92. When that comet collided with Jupiter in the summer of 1994, it marked the most astonishing collision in the solar system ever witnessed by humans. More important than its scientific value, Carolyn Shoemaker believed that a long-term project wasn’t worth doing unless it was fun.Ĭertainly, this powerful idea held true for her longest and most ambitious project, the Palomar Asteroid and Comet Survey - which led to her discoveries of hundreds of asteroids and 32 comets, including most spectacularly Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
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