Kickin’ At The Lick

Ashley and I headed up the deadly winding road to the top of Mount Hamilton last evening to visit the Lick Observatory – we’d won tickets to participate in the observatory’s Summer Visitors Program. Normally, the observatory is only open during the day, but the Summer Visitor Program invites visitors to view the stars through the 40-inch and 36-inch telescopes and listen to some of the observatory’s staff talk about the history of the observatory, and the research it is currently undertaking.

We managed to catch both the science lecture by Dr. David Koo, and the history lecture by Dorothy Schaumberg, curator of the Lick Observatory Archives. Dr. Koo’s lecture focused on how cosmologists are currently struggling to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy. To be honest, I’m not sure I understood either of them any better after the lecture – the main thing I took out of Dr. Koo’s talk was that the history and knowledge of the human race are insignificant when compared with the scale on which the universe operates.

Dorothy’s lecture on the history of the Lick Observatory started with background on James Lick, a famed local entrepreneur who left the money required to create the observatory. Dorothy gave a lively account of the man’s life and times, culminating in Lick being buried in the base of the 36-inch telescope at the Lick Observatory, and then traced through the history of the astronomers who made their names at the observatory. Of particular note: the fifth moon of Jupiter, Amalthea, discovered by Edward Barnard on his first night using the telescope.

After the lectures, we were treated by the telescopes of both the Lick Observatory and a number of amateur astronomers to views of M11 (The Wild Duck Cluster), M31 (The Andromeda Galaxy), M57 (The Ring Nebula), and M17 (The Swan Nebula).

Bummer of the evening: running over a rock two minutes out of the Lick Observatory parking lot, puncturing our car’s front left tire. D’oh!