“If you go to Paris, the observatory's in the middle of Paris. “From their models and predictions, they knew it was going to hit Mount Hamilton around noontime or so,” Chloros said in a briefing that was livestreamed yesterday.įounded in 1888 by real estate mogul James Lick, then California’s richest rich person, Lick was the world’s first mountaintop observatory. Here, Cal Fire workers could not only protect the observatory, but stage their efforts to fight fires elsewhere in the area.
By Wednesday morning, multiple fire-strike teams were setting up on-site-over a dozen engines and around 60 personnel. The approaching firestorm threatened to abruptly halt that legacy. Its Automated Planet Finder robotic telescope has been instrumental-literally and figuratively-in sniffing out the exoplanets that orbit distant stars. The observatory has helped scientists explore the structure of the universe, finding the masses of nearby galaxies, as well as black holes and quasars. It was here that in 1969 astronomers made the first laser lunar ranging, calculating the precise distance to the moon. That night, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, made the call to evacuate the facility’s 30-odd residents and staff members, save for the superintendent, Kostas Chloros, who’d stay on to coordinate the defense of one of the world’s most cherished observatories. Ten miles to the north of the historic Lick Observatory, atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose, one such blaze was closing in, and fast: By Tuesday morning, the flames were 6 miles away. On the morning of Sunday, August 16, freak summer thunderstorms rolled into the Bay Area, peppering the ultra-dry landscape with lightning, setting nearly 400 fires across Northern California.
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