DISNEY: I know one of the things that passed through my mind and that was, it seemed a terrible shame that Don Taylor wasn't there after he'd done so much towards it. So I went downstairs and rang him up. I said, "Don, we found the pulsar." And I could hear him sort of thinking things over in his mind and wondering what could possibly have gone wrong. But anyway, he made several suggestions. But he said he'd be up tomorrow to come have a look for himself, but in the meantime to keep fairly quiet about it. Well, we did a few more runs and convinced ourselves that we'd seen the pulsar, and then we rang our wives up.
COCKE: Taylor was very skeptical. He was even more skeptical than I had been. And—of course, by then, I was utterly convinced that we had it. And so—what we did was—we made just a continuing series of observations throughout the night of the pulsar in various colors and things like that. And then we closed up shop and went to bed.
And then the next evening, Taylor came up. And we set things up again and did another run or two for him, and I think he probably did some more tests then himself. So then, he was convinced that what we had was the real thing.
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Crab Nebula as seen in visible light with ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile |