(WIRED reached out to Cal Fire, but they were unable to comment for press time due to the ongoing wildfire in California.)
Crews are still checking the area around the observatory, seeing as this group of wildfires, known as the SCU Lightning Complex, continues to blacken the region. As of August 26, the complex has contained only 25 percent, and it has so far been chewed through 365,000 acres, or 570 square miles. But it appears the biggest threat to the historic Lick Observatory is over.
Lick was founded in 1888 by real estate James Lick, then the richest rich man in California, and was the first mountain observatory in the world. ‘When you go to Paris, the observers are in the middle of Paris. When you go to Bologna, the observatory is in the middle of Bologna, ”says Claire Max, director of the University of California Observatory, who leads Lick. “And so this was the first observatory that really benefited from being on a high site, where there is both less pollution and less light pollution, and clearer air.”
You might be thinking, ‘Wait a minute. That was 130 years ago – now the observatory is being picked 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 runs above both light pollution and smog? And it is true that terrestrial telescopes have some disadvantages. “For telescopes on the ground, light travels literally billions of light-years of restless space, and then in the last hundred kilometers it becomes blurred by turbulence in the air,” says Max.
The solution is lasers. Lick’s Shane telescope provides an adaptive optical system, which burns a tree into the atmosphere. “Adaptive optics measure turbulence hundreds or thousands of times per second, and then change the shape of a special mirror, called the deformable mirror, to remove the haze,” says Max.
The Shane telescope also has a larger mirror than Hubble: 3 meters compared to 2.4 meters. So if there happens to be a bright enough star at your viewing target, Max says, “you can get the same kind of spatial resolution as Hubble gets, because our telescope is more or less the same size, and we take the refinement of the atmosphere with adaptive optics. ”
Not only can the Lick Observatory astronomers get great images – even with all the light pollution and disturbance of the atmosphere above – it is also more accessible to researchers. “It’s a competition around the neck to spend time on Hubble,” says Max. “I do not know what the fraction of success is, but it is very low. And then if you to do success, you do not get much time to make your observations, because everyone else is on the piece. “
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