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Other Reflections: Is all the romance gone from astronomy

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In an article from CNN, astronomer and planet-hunter Geoff Marcy, nearing the end of a night on the Keck Observatory, laments:

"There are no eyepieces anywhere. In fact, we don't have an eyepiece for the Keck telescope. Some of the romance of astronomy is gone."

Is this true? Is technology removing the "romance" from astronomy?

Most people have the picture of the astronomer as a lone man on a mountain top, looking night after night through an eyepiece on the back of a giant telescope, somehow making measurements of other worlds and other galaxies. There was a time when this was tr...

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