Praise be to the slightly moist, changing winds — they helped spare Mt. Wilson. Or so it seems for now. Deep breath taken. And now please allow me to pull from the files a feature I wrote for the LA Weekly about the Mt. Wilson observatory. It is one of the first things I wrote, and it remains a favorite, partly out of a multi-layered nostalgia: for the old LA Weekly; for the early, exciting days of a newly found writing career; and for the sheer awe of visiting the Hooker dome, which, unless you’re pretending to be a science journalist from, say, the LA Weekly, is difficult to do.
The Hooker dome was the biggest telescope in the world for 50 years, and it’s where Edwin Hubble first discovered that there are galaxies. Many many many other galaxies in the universe. Then, he discovered from the light of those galaxies that the universe is expanding. From that came the Big Bang theory, and modern cosmology. All from right there, above Altadena. Even Einstein had to rethink things and came up for a visit.
Read the full article here. (scroll down)
