I missed, until now, the news that on Christmas Day, high winds accompanying a violent storm seriously damaged the historic Lick Observatory.
The gales were strong enough to rip one of the shutters from the dome of the 36″ refracting telescope and send it crashing onto the roof of the adjacent building.
The Observatory remains closed to the public while the structural damage is assessed and repairs made. Fortunately it seems nobody was hurt and no instruments were affected.
Here’s a video of the detached shutter being removed
The Lick Observatory is located on Mount Hamilton near San Jose in California. A donation by San Francisco millionaire James Lick enabled the construction of the 36” (diameter) refractor, the most powerful telescope in the world at the time. The Observatory was almost destroyed in 2020 by a wildfire, but the new incident is the most serious damage in its 137-year history.
As I blogged about here, the Lick Observatory played an important role in the development of our understanding of the large-scale structure of the Universe, specifically with the creation of the Lick galaxy survey prepared by Charles Donald Shane and Carl Alvar Wirtanen and published in 1967 (Publ. Lick. Observatory 22, Part 1). In my more poetic moments, the image on the left puts me in mind of W.B. Yeats: Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths.
That catalogue was still proving a useful resource well into the 1990s; I was part of various analyses of it myself, starting with this paper from 1991. It was eventually superceded by the arrival of large-scale galaxy redshift surveys, but it remaining an amazing achievement.
The Lick Galaxy survey was not performed with the 36″ refractor mentioned above, however, but by twin 20″ Carnegie astrographic telescopes housed in a different dome. As far as I know, these were not damaged in the storm.
In the Dark 