By ten or eleven in the evening, Perlmutter was alone and the images would begin to emerge on his screen. Each image held hundreds of galaxies; by the end of the night he would collect dozens of images. He printed out each one, just in case. Sometimes the computer told him that a blip of light had appeared that hadn’t been there the previous month, and he would bend close to the screen and try to figure out what was wrong. The view of the wide-field camera distorted the geometry, so he didn’t trust blips near the edge of the frame. Sometimes a blip would be too near the center of a galaxy,
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