The most important things we know about the cosmos were discovered in the mountains above Los Angeles. 'You don’t just throw away a historic place,' says one of the volunteers trying to save it.
Saving Mt. Wilson Observatory: Inside the long battle to maintain the spot where we found our place in the universe
The observatory sits at the summit of 5,715-foot Mt. Wilson, accessible only by a serpentine stretch of Angeles Crest Highway.established it in 1904 with funding from what is now Carnegie Science, building a mountaintop telescope demanded a new level of ambition.The 100-inch telescope mirror is transported to Mt. Wilson Observatory in July 1917. The mirror is covered with a white tarpaulin and is loaded into the back of a truck.
Over the following weeks, as Hubble he peered closely at the image, he noticed three distinct points of light in the fuzzy cloud of stars, rather than the single one he expected to see. He marked each with an N, for nebula. Nearly 100 years later, Tom Meneghini, executive director of the Mt. Wilson Institute, stepped expertly among the vintage scientific equipment scattered around the ground floor of the great telescope, reaching into shadows to flick on light switches he knew were there.
The office for Carnegie Observatories still occupies its original space in Pasadena, a 1912 building with a book-lined library, a large portrait of Hale andlives there, as do 250,000 others taken over the years at Mt. Wilson. Among other records, the archives contain a copy of Hubble’s logbook from the fall of 1923. His handwriting in the Oct. 5 entry is unusually cramped and urgent, the Hubble equivalent of unrestrained glee.
Eight months after Carnegie’s retreat, a constellation of former employees, scientists and observatory fans incorporated the Mt. Wilson Institute. Four years later, CarnegieYou don’t just throw away a historic place like that.Today, the Mt. Wilson Institute has three full-time paid employees, all maintenance workers and groundskeepers. Two paid part-timers manage projects. Everything else is done by an unusually skilled corps of volunteers.
“The only people who have time to do this are retirees,” said Meneghini, who spends about 60 unpaid hours per week managing personnel, paying bills and doing any odd jobs that need doing.
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