I was at an unusual and splendid event on Saturday. My friend and colleague, the writer Aimee Bender, organized a group of 25 of us to go to the top of Mount Wilson and spend the evening, mostly sitting in the dark, right up to well after midnight! What were we doing? Astronomy. We had the Mount Wilson Observatory’s 60 inch telescope entirely at our disposal!! This is not any old 60 inch telescope – it is one of the historic telescopes that’s up there, used since the early part of the 20th Century to discover things about our galaxy and beyond.
(See also a post I did about the 100 inch, and the hike you can do up the mountain to see the site. [Update: Note – For this trip, we drove up, carpooling!])
Aimee had reserved the space well in advance, and we had a guide and a telescope operator (the excellent Shelley Bonus and Arbi Karapetian, respectively), and we brought food, which was spread out on a large table alongside vats of coffee and hot water (for tea), supplied by the observatory.
This is an excellent way to spend an evening. Shelley is informative and enthusiastic, and does a great job of selecting various objects to be viewed (she also takes requests!) and giving lots of information and anecdotes about them, and much else besides. Arbi was also a gold mine of information.
The party was of 24 non-scientists (there were a lot of writers of various types, for example – poets, screenwriters, novellists, experts in poetry and literature and language…) and one physicist. As the latter, I tried to remain undercover, so as not to make the guide feel like she was being “fact-checked”, but my cover was blown by someone pretty early on (they did not know I was intending to be in hiding). But it turned out that I needn’t have worried, since Shelley was very good about it, and even invited me to chime in at any point. I did not. It was her show, not mine, and she was doing just fine without me…
We’re all pretty spoiled these days with wonderful images from space on tv and the web, and that’s a great thing that I wouldn’t change (I’ve shown you several here on the blog). But the drawback is that people are a bit jaded by the real thing, and so there’s always the worry that people will not be as impressed with some telescope images as you might hope. It’s hard to try to explain how wonderful it is to see something with your “naked eye” – in the sense that the light you’re seeing actually came directly from the object you’re looking at. I find this latter a wonderful thing, and so staring through a telescope always gives me a tingle.
Check back for a video I made of the interior, including some footage of the dome being opened, and rotated (to everyone’s delight). On the left is a still (click on it and look closely) of someone peering through the scope in the dead of night. The shy is light because there was a nearly full moon.
Any doubts (perhaps brought on by people’s reactions to an earnest but wobbly early appearance from Mars) about how the evening’s viewing would be taken were blown 
away by the first big marquee animal of the show: Saturn. Shelley did a clever thing by simply not telling us what was up next, and then as we lined up to have a look through the eyepiece, one by one people gasped upon looking, and then came down the ladder with a glow you could see in the half-light. Big showy Saturn, with her entourage of rings and four clearly visible satellites, turned everyone into the child that they should be for events like this: Full of awe and wonder. The rest of the evening (involving several globular clusters, a binary star, the limb of the nearly-full moon, and so forth) was magical.
I had a lot of fun, as did everyone else I’ve heard from*. Thanks Aimee!!
-cvj
P.S. *Hey, instead of going to a (sort of) physics-themed bar/nightclub like this year, maybe I’ll book the telescope for my birthday party next year! Also, some have been so inspired by it, there’s an idea afoot to do a biology version of the event. Perhaps I’ll tap on the shoulder of some of my colleagues in biology here at USC…
P.P.S. You can do this too. It is wonderful that members of the general community can go up and observe. Look here for booking details.
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astronomy party! sounds really cool! this really is a great (and unique) idea.. you can also couple this adventure with hiking. it would be fun!
This is an excellent post Clifford. Thanks for sharing the experience. I still remember my first astronomy book that my mother bought for me. It was called, “Fifty Facts About Space.” That was ages, and ages ago.
Hmmm, not that I know of. I heard of a great beer place in Atwater Village (I think) that is supposed to be really good, but I do not know if they do that sort of event. Maybe another reader knows…. Sounds like fun though!
Cheers,
-cvj
This might be a random question, but I think you’re the person most likely to know the answer…
There’s a pub in Houston (my hometown) that, once a week, features a beer; whoever buys a pint of that beer gets to keep the logo glass that it comes in.
Is there any bar or pub-type place in LA that does something similar?
They sold it to the local county parks commission. I don’t know what exactly the plans are (and suspect they don’t know themselves) but there’s a chance the scope will still be used.
Problem with it is it’s been neglected these past few years since CWRU has a scope out on Kitt Peak, so the telescope mirror needs to be realuminized and stuff like that. So we’ll see what happens.
Oh dear… they sold it? To a private concern, or will it still be available for use of people from the general populace?
-cvj
Aren’t star parties fun? 😀 My last one on this scale was just a few weeks ago actually- the university was finally going to sell our old observatory an hour outside Cleveland because it hasn’t been used for years, including its 38″, but a few of us geeks convinced an old astronomer to have one last night with her and it was utterly gorgeous. Not a night we’ll be forgetting for a long, long time…
I was also lucky enough in my teenage years to spend a few nights looking with the naked eye using a 61″ at Mount Bigelow, Arizona. I always thought even then that the best way to get more money for the sciences would be to get a bunch of politicians up to one of those huge telescopes for a night of observing, as it’s enough to bring anyone to their knees.
Presumably they schedule these things only when the moon is full.
In the early years of this century, my partner and I went to an event run by the Columbia Alumni Club at Mt. Wilson. We had dinner in the dome of the 100-inch instrument; while we were eating, and without telling us, they started up the rotation of the dome. Everything rotates, except the telescope. I think we all thought that it was the telescope that was rotating. The mechanism was so smooth, and the acceleration was so slight, that we were totally unaware that we were moving. Only the sight of the rising full moon sailing past the open observing-slot made it clear that we were in motion.
For me the great observing moment was the globular cluster they showed us. I think it was the well-known one in Hercules. In an amateur scope, they look like smudges, but in a big instrument, you can see the individual stars, and the effect is entirely different.
Thanks Clifford! Such great photos and comments. And I’m glad you leave the booking info too because it is something others should definitely check out– a really, really amazing thing that they open it up to the public.