{"id":4696,"date":"2013-05-27T13:55:57","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T21:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4696"},"modified":"2013-06-18T13:00:42","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T21:00:42","slug":"the-lick-observatory-on-mount-hamilton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/27\/the-lick-observatory-on-mount-hamilton\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned that I went to watch the Science Fiction Writer\u2019s of America Nebula Awards meeting in downtown San Jose last week. Right next door in the San Jose convention center was a comics convention, with a hundred times as many people attending.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some women had dressed up and were hanging out outside the paying entrance to the con so people could talk to them and take their pictures. Being stars. A vintage comix con scene. A guy was dressed up like a bull called Bull-It. Also vintage. Often we have people like this mixed in with the writers and editors at SF cons, but this time we were at separate meetings.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been out hiking pretty often around my neighborhood lately, beating cross-country through brush up towards St. Joseph\u2019s hill above Los Gatos. I\u2019m using my new wide-angle lens a lot. It takes very sharp images, so I can crop down to, like, tiny postage stamp area out of a picture to get surveillance-style photo like this. Afghanistan on Route 17!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I get to the top of the hill, and it\u2019s a steep, long climb, I lie down under this one particular tree and mark up my latest print-out of plans or text from my nearly finished novel The Big Aha<\/em>. I call this my \u201cfield office.\u201d\u009d I\u2019m so exhausted by the time I get up here that the ground feels incredibly comfortable, and my mind is empty, and I\u2019m happy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Another surveillance image, this one is a pair of free binoculars near the observatory up at the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton near San Jose.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first part of the Lick Observatory <\/a>was finished in 1888. This building has an old-school refractor (with lenses) telescope installed. This guy James Lick paid for it, he\u2019d wanted to have a pyramid larger than the Pyramid of Giza erected in his memory on a full city block in San Francisco, but the city fathers nixed it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The over-a-century-old scope is kind of beautiful against the ribbing of the dome. The scientists don\u2019t actually use it anymore, they have a more modern reflecting telescope up there they use instead.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We went up there the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend\u2014our concept was not to do the obvious thing and to drive to the beach in Santa Cruz\u2014this way we didn\u2019t have any traffic probs. But there were a zillion bicyclists riding up the 4,000 fee to the observatory. People are so intense about exercise anymore, I wonder why that is.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In any case, they were having fun. And then they got to do an insanely long coast downhill.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bunch of other domes for \u201d\u02dcscopes up on Mt. Hamilton. Pushing up like puffball mushrooms.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The big reflector \u201d\u02dcscope is in this vaguely Art Deco building, nobody around in the daytime, with the \u201d\u02dcscope behind a glass wall. I like the single word PULL here.<\/p>\n


\n Click for a larger version of “The Theory of Everything.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Inside the building I got a wide-angle picture in the entrance hall that I really like. I call this \u201cThe Theory of Everything,\u201d\u009d my idea being that we have all of these very precisely located and well-describable object arranged just so in this clear-cut space, and there\u2019s a curious domain wall beyond which is the bright-matter zone called outdoors, with a car particle visible. But here inside the dim ocher room, our system works. You can even see a water fountain particle, as predicted by our theory.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The had this one cute little dome, the Automated Planet Finder<\/a>, and it looked like Sonic the Hedgehog with a Mohawk.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Later we parked halfway down Mt. Hamilton and walked a bit along a trail off the \u201cTwo Gates\u201d\u009d point in Grant Park, and I saw this amazing Oriental-tapestry-type oak tree. Having left my superduper theory-of-everything 5D camera in the car, I took a lo-res surveillance photo with my smart phone that sort of captures the idea, after I tweaked it like a mofo in Lighroom. But I still want to go back there and really nail the image for my as-yet-incomplete report on this zone of the Milky Way Galaxy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned that I went to watch the Science Fiction Writer\u2019s of America Nebula Awards meeting in downtown San Jose last week. Right next door in the San Jose convention center was a comics convention, with a hundred times as many people attending. Some women had dressed up and were hanging out outside the paying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-the-big-aha"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4696"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4741,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions\/4741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}