The Astronomer In the Engine Room

The U.S. Naval Observatory needed a new survey of Jupiter's moons as a navigational aid for future space probes. To assemble the vital data, it turned not to a top-ranking astronomer but to an unassuming Caltech research associate who had no Ph.D., had published no papers and had no other academic achievements to his name. "I know nothing about astrophysics or electrodynamics," says Charles Kowal, 34. "All I'm good at is using a telescope."

Topsy-Turvy Life. As the Naval Observatory was well aware, that was more than good enough. Last year in the course of his survey with the big 481n. Schmidt telescope atop California's Palomar mountain, Kowal discovered Jupiter's 13th moon, the first new satellite to be found in the solar system in eight years. So it was not exactly a surprise to Naval Observatory astronomers when Kowal repeated his triumph by discovering the 14th Jovian satellite, a moonlet only a few miles in diameter. "It's not like the discovery of America," Kowal insists. "It's more like the discovery of Catalina Island."

Not quite. Finding so tiny an object at such great distance (400 million miles) demanded extraordinary perseverence and precision. "I wake up and eat breakfast with the moon," says Kowal of his topsy-turvy life at Palomar. "Dinner comes at midnight and lunch is at 5 a.m." Before exposing each photographic plate in the telescope, he baked the film for five hours in a nitrogen-filled oven to make it highly sensitive. Afterward, he sat eight to ten hours at a stretch in a darkened room before a device called a blink microscope. One after another, in rapid succession, the microscope gave him glimpses of two plates, each showing the same section of sky at different times. When a speck on one of the star-filled pictures seemed to move against the background of "fixed" stars as the device shifted back and forth, the change indicated the presence of a moving object in the solar system--an asteroid, comet or, in Kowal's case, a Jovian moon.

Kowal has been infatuated with astronomy since, as a six-year-old in Buffalo, he read a book titled The Stars in Myth and Fact. Soon he was building his own telescopes out of pieces of pipe, cardboard tubing and home-ground mirrors. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1961, he decided to apply to Caltech's astronomy department for a job; he had no taste for graduate studies. Explains Kowal: "I enjoy learning things, but a university is the last place in the world to learn anything."

As his first assignment at Palomar. which is owned by Caltech, Kowal searched for supernovas--the great stellar explosions that mark the death of giant stars. None has been observed in the earth's Milky Way Galaxy since 1604, but the sharp-eyed Kowal has found 77 supernovas in distant galaxies. He has also participated in an international search for "lost" comets that have shifted their course. So far, Kowal has spotted three such cosmic strays.

For all his achievements, Kowal remains largely ignored by his more illustrious colleagues, who prefer to focus their attention on more exotic objects like pulsars, quasars and black holes. Still, the obscure research associate is moving up in the organization. Two years ago, his office was in the third basement of a Caltech physics building, but he has since been elevated to the subbasement. Kowal is not particularly impressed. "This building is like an ocean liner," he says wryly. "All the professors are up there on the promenade deck promenading. This is the engine room where all the work gets done."

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