“The Gnat had no airlock as such—nothing large enough for the crew to come and go without depressurising the whole cabin—but Marzio had designed a miniature version, equipped with lever-operated scoops and pincers, that allowed them to move these tiny samples the short distance through the hull and into the catapult’s launch tube. Back when the surface of the Peerless had been suffering the sporadic flashes attributed to orthogonal dust, no one had ever managed to observe—let alone record—the li...ght’s spectrum. Before the centrifugal force of the mountain’s spin put an end to those displays, people had proposed spectrographs with such a wide angle of view that the inability to know precisely where the light would be coming from would cease to matter. The problem they’d never solved, though, had been the question of timing: no one could react quickly enough to open a shutter just as the flash occurred, and a prolonged wide angle exposure, even if it encompassed one of the rare events, would bury any signal from the flash itself in the accumulated background of reflected starlight.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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