A California Wildfire Nearly Destroyed the Historic Lick Observatory

“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.The fire reached close to the observatory’s first structures at 3 that afternoon, with the facility’s cameras, which are normally trained on the telescope domes and the surrounding mountainside, filming the moment of encroachment. “This is a miracle, that these folks—with heroic efforts—they were able to keep the structures still standing,” Chloros said.(WIRED reached out to Cal Fire, but they were not able to provide comment before press time due to California’s ongoing wildfires.)Crews are still monitoring the area around the observatory, given that this group of wildfires, known as the SCU Lightning Complex, continues to blacken the region. If you go to Bologna, the observatory's in the middle of Bologna,” says Claire Max, director of the University of California Observatories, which runs Lick. That was 130 years ago—now the observatory is plopped right above one of the most densely populated areas of the US!” How could Lick compete with the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits far above both light pollution and smog? So if there happens to be a bright enough star nearby your viewing target, Max says, “you can get the same kind of spatial resolution that Hubble gets, because our telescope is more or less the same size, and we're taking away the blurring of the atmosphere with adaptive optics.”Not only can the Lick Observatory get astronomers great images—even with all the light pollution and disturbance of the atmosphere above—it’s also more accessible for researchers.