The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.
We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.
At the age of eight, I bought my first telescope and would spend hours gazing at the moon and stars. I remember thinking what it must have been like when man first realized that we were only a very small part of the overall picture.
I'm such a long-term investor, I've never really let go and celebrated what I did with the Hubble telescope.
I have a fine lot of telescopes. I have one with which I can see the Mountains in the Moon.
What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.
In 1959 the University recognized our work by appointing me to a new Chair of Radio Astronomy.
After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.