Looking for a Second Earth in the Shadows - Issue 11: Light
▻http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/looking-for-a-second-earth-in-the-shadows
Some dark, clear nights, when the blazing stars cast shadows down on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the astronomer Olivier Guyon steps away from his workbench and computer screens and walks outside the giant 8-meter Subaru Telescope to savor the heavens. Guyon began his habit of stargazing about the same time he first decided to become an astronomer, as a young boy in the countryside of northeastern France. At 17, he built his first telescope, a half-meter Dobsonian he still occasionally uses today. Guyon kept stargazing through college, then graduate studies at the University of Paris and doctoral work at the University of Hawaii, but today, in his late 30s, with waves of silver lapping at the edges of his dark hair, he can rarely spare the time. He steals a glance skyward, eyes large, and for a (...)