Palomar Observatory says goodbye to its cosmetic restaurant – infosrk.club

“When you’re going to stay up all night on a cold mountaintop, staring through your eyes at the twinkling stars that are so far away and so impossible, or looking at pixels on screen, it helps a lot if you’ve eaten well. at first.

So it was disappointing to learn recently that the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, home to the famous 200-inch Hale telescope – the “Big Eye” – had closed the kitchen that brought provided a sumptuous meal for astronauts while they watched. This was done because the costs were too expensive, the California Institute of Technology, which owns and operates Palomar, announced this in May.

So ends one of the warmest traditions in astronomy: dinner with your colleagues, a chance for astronomers to talk, gossip, learn what everyone is doing, hear old stories , and just being together on a cloudy night. From now on, astronomers staying at the Monastery, the cabin where observers stay while using the telescope at Palomar, must deal with frozen meals that can for them to heat themselves and eat.

“For me, the Abbey was (and still is for those of us who wanted or needed to go there) the epicenter of the non-telescope period there,” said Rebecca Oppenheimer, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History. to spend hundreds of nights at Palomar, in email.

“Dinner is a wonderful tradition, ready before sunset, expertly prepared and served, where you get to meet people from different places working on many different projects, “said Dr. Oppenheimer. “The chefs make everyone feel special and warm, and they become friends, really. Even on a cloudy night, someone might see them later in the evening, perhaps with a fire burning in the fireplace.”

But her last trip was “weird and sad,” she said, “eating frozen meals at any time, with no food listed as a punctuation mark to start the evening.” Observatories have long had cooks and canteens to keep astronauts hydrated and productive. When I was editor of Sky & Telescope magazine in the 1970s, we received a quarterly newsletter from the European Southern Observatory, a consortium based in Munich with a telescope in La Silla, Chile. Along with the news from the mountain, there was a menu full of what was being served to astronomers in the south.

That was the golden age of food. But as the popularity of viewing away from home limited the observatory’s customer base, this practice began to fade.

“Wow, the quality and attention given to food at observatories has decreased in the last 40 years,” said Reinhard Genzel, a German astronomer who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for research he did with the Very Large Telescope at Southern Europe. Observatory in Chile.

Alice Shapley, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, fondly remembers the blocks of Red Vine licorice and boxes of animal bites that helped her get through the long nights at Palomar. Today, astronomers at many of the observatories have to look for themselves at local shopping malls.

“Dining at Palomar is much more enjoyable and satisfying,” he said.

“Big Food for Big Eyes”

The 200-inch Hale telescope, which entered service in 1948, was the largest and most important telescope on Earth for nearly half a century. Everyone who has any importance in the field of astrology – and even those who are purely religious – has stopped.

Wendy Freedman, an astronomer and former director of the Carnegie Observatory in Pasadena, California, who is now at the University of Chicago, often uses the Palomar telescope. “I remember a memorable dinner with hosts Sidney Poitier and Johnny Carson, I think in the late 1980s,” he said in an email. create a fancy dining room. They probably think we eat like that all the time.”

The dinner at Palomar continues an earlier tradition at the Mount Wilson Observatory outside of Pasadena. The astronauts’ dormitory there, a series of simple rooms set on the edge of a cliff, is the original monastery, which has a digam or site, nicknamed the Monastery, so named because the mountain and to bar the telescope to women. (One astronomer who managed to break this barrier, Margaret Burbidge, did so by standing as a supporter of her husband, Geoffrey Burbidge, who was just presenting the theory.)