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Road Trip March 2009 Lick Observatory, California Lick Telescope

This site is part of our visit to Lick Observatory. Click the left turn sign to get back to the start page or the U-turn sign to get back to the road trips page.

Moonrise at Lick Observatory on top of Mt. Hamilton in a picture borrowed from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

The Great Lick Telescope is one of America's oldest telescopes. When it was finished in 1887, it also was the world's largest one. Only five years into to the life of the telescope, in 1892, astronomer E. E. Barnard discovered Amalthea, a moon in orbit of Jupiter. Today , moons are not a big deal; we know over 300 in our solar system and 63 of them orbit Jupiter. But at the time of Barnard's discovery, only 20 moons were known and Amalthea was the first Jupiter Moon discovered in 282 years, ever since Galileo used his first telescope in 1610. Today, the Lick Telescope still works as well as it did 120 years ago. It still doesn't use any computer technology, meaning all coordinates have to be entered manually and then the telescope's hydraulic system rotates the dome, adjust the angel of the telescope and raises or lowers the floor to bring the observer within convenient reach of the eye end of the telescope. A mechanical clockwork adjusts for the Earth's rotation as it did more than a century ago. Again, we are not going to bore you with the entire history of the place, but if you are interested in details, you can check it out at Wikipedia. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>Lick Telescope in 1889 (from Wikipedia)

Of all the discoveries done here, the one we found most interesting was that of near earth asteroid 1950DA, which has been classified as the asteroid with the highest known probability of impacting Earth. But don't worry, it is not going to happen until sometime in 2880. Below are two pictures of what the telescope looks like today.

Picture published at Wikipedia - taken with professional equipment	Picture taken without artificial light sources with a Kodak camera that Volker tried to hold steady for 2.5 seconds.

The Main Complex

XXXXXXXXXX>Lick Observatory, main building

Lick Observatory, astronomer's dormitoryXXXXXXX>

Lick Observatory (top left) was built at a time when people paid attention to architectural details, so it is not only a place of great science but also a place of interesting architecture. The tiny town of Mount Hamilton is home to 38 people, mostly astronomers and their families, but also has its own police station and a post office. In addition, between two to ten visiting astronomers from the University of California campuses stay in dormitory (top right) while working at the Observatory. The main task at the observatory is of course astronomy, but there is also a small exhibition, a weather station and a seismograph and in addition the people working here never get tired answering questions (well maybe they do, but they don't show it).

Meteor at the observatory's exhibition	Original seismographic recording of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake	Modern seismograph (it recorded two little earth quakes somewhere the day we visited.)

There is a lot more here: In the left picture you can see the Crossley Reflector, the second oldest instrument at the observatory. And then there was the smallest telescope on the hill (right picture), which proved totally useless in the fog. We also discovered a bench, dedicated to a very inspiring woman, a bust of the mountain's namesake and a really interesting picture gallery. Check out the last page of this trip!

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