Some scientists make great discoveries. Some scientists provide the opportunity for other scientists to make great discoveries. Let us now praise one not-so-famous man.
Victor Blanco assumed the directorship of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in June 1967, just five months before the observatory opened. CTIO, a collaboration between U.S. and Chile, was an attempt to correct a grievous astronomical oversight: the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. Prior to CTIO, the number of observatories in the Northern Hemisphere was 88, and the number of observatories in the Southern was 10. The disparity in the quality of observing conditions, however, was even more pronounced. The number of Southern Hemisphere observatories with both frequent clear night skies and exceptional “seeing,” as astronomers call atmospheric conditions, was zero.
When surveyors began scouting for a site for CTIO, they already knew that the Atacama desert, in northern Chile, was one of the world’s driest, meaning that astronomical observations would be relatively free of distortions caused by moisture in the atmosphere. But they found that the desert air was unusually stable, too, due to a semi-permanent high pressure system. They settled on Cerro Tololo, a 2200-meter high mountain in the southern part of the desert, about 80 kilometers east of the coastal town of La Serena.
Blanco was born in 1918 in Puerto Rico. As a child, he earned money by raising pigs, which he named after asteroids—Ceres, Vesta, Ganymede. Before he accepted the directorship of CTIO, he had served as an astronomer at the Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western) and the U.S. Naval Observatory. At CTIO, however, he found that he had to be more than an astronomer, even more than an administrator. He needed to be a diplomat.
When the Marxist Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidential election in September 1970, Blanco learned that U.S. sponsors were reluctant to risk further resources on a project operating under an anti-U.S. leadership. So Blanco traveled to Santiago, met with Allende himself, and received promises of the president-elect’s complete support. During the severe economic and political crises that followed, Blanco later wrote, “not a single observing night was lost.”
Continue reading →
I am a bit of a Civil War nerd. I inherited this interest from my dad. Together we have visited many of the Civil War’s top landmarks (we’ve even paid our respects to Stonewall Jackson’s left arm). But for all of the time I’ve spent on battlefields, I never gave any thought to the landscapes on which the war was waged until I read Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic.
