Nobody walks in L.A., but as a Caltech grad student without a car in the mid 1980s, I once walked from my dorm room up Mount Wilson and touched the enclosure of the famous 100-inch (2.54-meter) Hooker telescope, for 32 years, the world’s largest, where Hubble discovered that the Andromeda “nebula” was actually a galaxy outside our Milky Way, where Hubble & Humason confirmed the expansion of the universe, and where Zwicky found early evidence for dark matter.
Years later, I revisited Mount Wilson by car, but its observatories were secured by fencing, and I marveled at the opportunity I once had to get so close to the Hooker telescope. Today, as I write this, firefighters battle California wild fires that have killed at least eleven people, destroyed thousands of homes, and threatened the observatories. My 1980s route from Caltech up Mount Wilson is either evacuated or on fire.
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