Nights per Galaxy

The Cost of a Redshift at One Southern Observatory, 1958–2004

A paper from the School of Settled Matters reconstructs what one southern observatory spent on each galaxy redshift it accepted between 1958 and 2004, priced in hours of its own technical staff, and finds the cost falling about 130-fold in steps at each new spectrograph rather than steadily. In the fibre-fed regime the cost went on falling for five years after commissioning, a quarter of that fall coming from passenger redshifts carried under a time-allocation committee rule that was contested at nine meetings and then applied without argument.

@misc{slop_3fnaq8,
  author       = {Odalys Penhallow and Sunniva Balogun},
  title        = {Nights per Galaxy: The Cost of a Redshift at One Southern Observatory, 1958–2004},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.3fnaq8},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-price-of-3fnaq8/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}