Sky and Telescope - August 2015 - 26

Telescopes Under Siege: Lick Observatory

Lick Observatory, 2015

Name

6
3

S&T: LEAH TISCIONE

1895

2. 0.9-meter Clark refractor

1888

3. 1-meter Nickel reﬂector

1979

4. 0.5-meter Tauchmann reﬂector

c. 1955

5. Crocker dome (empty: 0.2-meter removed)

c. 1892

7. Double Astrograph, each 0.5 meter (not in use)

C A L I F O R N I A

The drama that Lick endured is a complicated, politicsladen tale, and the observatory does not yet stand on
ﬁnancial bedrock. But its experience holds important lessons for supporters of other threatened observatories.

An Iconic California Institution
During the California gold rush, entrepreneur James
Lick bought land being sold cheaply by men headed
for the state's gold ﬁelds. Soon, Lick owned vast tracts
of prime real estate in San Francisco, San Jose, and
elsewhere. Inspired by other philanthropists seeking
immortality by establishing major observatories (S&T:
June 2011, p. 28), in the 1870s Lick bequeathed $700,000
- equivalent to $1.45 billion today in terms of relative
share of GDP - to build "a powerful telescope, superior
to and more powerful than any telescope ever yet made
. . . and also a suitable observatory."
When transferred to the 20-year-old University of
California (then occupying a single campus at Berkeley),
the observatory instantly conferred on the ﬂedgling
university the status of a world-class research institution.
Lick astronomers have conducted research continuously
since its 0.9-meter (36-inch) Clark refractor - then the
largest in the world - was dedicated in 1888. In 1892
E. E. Barnard used it to discover Amalthea, the ﬁrst
Jovian moon discovered since Galileo's observations
nearly three centuries prior. Lick's 3-meter Shane reﬂector was the world's second largest when built in 1959, and
it's used today for a wide range of astronomical research.
As it grew and evolved, Lick mothballed older instruments and installed new ones. Today the observatory is
26

1. 0.9-meter Crossley reﬂector (not in use)

6. 2.4-meter Automated Planet Finder

August 2015 sky & telescope

Date
Installed

2013
1941, 1947

8. 0.6-meter Coudé Auxiliary Telescope

1969

9. 3-meter Shane reﬂector

1959

10. 0.76-meter Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope

1996

This list doesn't include smaller instruments that are not in use
or are dismounted, such as the 0.3-meter (12-inch) Clark refractor,
which in 1881 was the ﬁrst telescope mounted at Lick. (The Nickel
reﬂector replaced it.) Find a detailed list of past and present instruments at www.ucolick.org/~sla/mtham/instruments.html.

home to several active research telescopes ranging in
aperture from 0.76 to 3 meters (see table above), plus a
handful of smaller instruments. For nearly two decades
its 0.76-meter Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope
has conducted one of the world's most successful
searches for extragalactic supernovae. The fully robotic
2.4-meter Automated Planet Finder (APF) began science
operations in 2013 and uses precision spectroscopy to
detect the tiniest - down to a half meter per second -
wobble of stars' positions, created by the gravitational
tug of the stars' orbiting planets.
Meantime, as UC established other campuses around
the state, Lick became the prime teaching and research
facility for their astronomy faculty and students. Thanks
to Lick, astronomers at all campuses - even from
smaller departments such as that at UC Riverside - had
access to instrumentation they could not aﬀord to build
themselves. Its optical and machine shops also helped
develop the twin 10-meter telescopes for the W. M. Keck
Observatory atop Mauna Kea and designed the ﬁrst
practical laser guide-star adaptive optics system to "detwinkle" stars - ﬁrst installed on the Shane reﬂector
and now used at many observatories worldwide.

Budget Crunch and Henhouse Fox
Beginning in 1978, however, a series of legislative changes
and ﬁnancial squeezes shrank state support for the UC
system. After the 2008-09 economic meltdown, the state
slashed UC's budget by a quarter billion or half billion
dollars at a go, sometimes twice in a year. Cuts of such
magnitude are not readily absorbed even by a complex

http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/mtham/instruments.html

Sky and Telescope - August 2015

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