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Published: September 6th 2010
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The Lick Observatory
In the 1880s, very rich Californian named Lick, wanted to be remembered. So he built this observatory and it has added greatly to the science of astronomy. First of all, apologies to our friend Barbara Saxton—in my haste to send the last blog, I forgot to insert the details of her truly wonderful CD: “A Star is Shining”. I promise you that if you like women's voices, a cappella singing and folk songs from many countries, you'll love this CD. You can find out more at
http://www.borntodrone.org. Or just google "Born to Drone" and you'll find it, among other crazy references to bagpipes and vacuum cleaners.
Also, Owen works at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, not SLAK (oops!) as I mentioned.
August 27-28: I imagine that most of you have seen the movie “Groundhog's Day”. In it the main character gets stuck living the same day over and over again. He's an arrogant TV reporter who is doing a stand-up piece on Groundhog's Day, February 2, when legend has it in Pennsylvania that if the groundhog emerges from his winter den and sees his shadow he gets frightened and returns to his hole and there will be several more weeks of winter. If the groundhog emerges and doesn't see his shadow, spring is on the way. This legend has always seemed bizarre to me, but even more
36" lens telescope
In its day, this was the most powerful telescope in America, maybe in the world. The lenses were made in France and the lensmakers said they were the best they ever made. bizarre is what happens in the film. The character gets CAUGHT in Groundhog's Day, and has to repeat it and repeat it till he becomes a better person (at which point he's worthy to win the love of a pretty young co-worker).
At a signature moment in the film, the main character is sitting in a bar and he says, in exasperation to the fellow drinking next to him, something like, “How would you like it if every day was a repeat of the one before and nothing ever changed?”
“That about sums it up,” says the other guy.
As a “hunter-gatherer” of the media world, I've been lucky to have had lots of variety in my life. But there was a time when I thought I, too, was in Groundhog's Day. That was in my final year in Townsville (2002), when Phil had already moved to Sydney. Each morning the alarm clock would jolt me awake and I'd rush out for a 45 minute walk with the new puppy, get home and get the kids up and out to school (that's when Amber was also living with us), go off to uni to teach all day
Phil heads for the big one
There are ten telescopes at the Lick Observatory and nine are still actively being used for research. and work on the 2nd edition of “Producing Videos”, which was getting close to deadline, come home, cook dinner, wash up, get the kids to bed and collapse into bed myself. Then the alarm would ring again!
But now on this wonderful trip my life is so different I've decided I'm living in “Butterfly Days”. Phil and I get up when we please, eat and do whatever we want, travel as far as we want, hike when we want, and we flit from activity to activity like butterflies, following the next scent and whatever colors call to us.
And while living this way, we're open to serendipity. (Do you know the derivation of that word? It's from a Persian story about the 3 Princes of Serendip, who had a habit—or the luck—of coming upon good things by accident.)
So we left San Francisco with an untutored plan to head for Yosemite. I chose a road which I thought was more direct than Phil's planned one. Phil was suspicious. “What does it mean if the road is grey? he asked. “On a map this big, it just means it's a more local road,” I replied. “It will be
120" reflector telescope
The Lick Observatory is outstanding for finding planets around other suns. sealed.”
And it was. It was a sealed-over mule track, with 365 turns (many hairpins) in the following 24 miles!!!! But why was it there? It was built to haul the materials up a mountain to set up one of the most fabulous astronomical observatories ever, the Lick Observatory. (We'd never heard of it. Sorry Owen! But we plan to visit you in Chile when yours gets on line.) It has 10 telescopes, 9 still in use for research. This observatory, financed in the mid 1800s by an extremely wealthy man named Lick, towers above San Jose and has the distinction of having found more planets in other solar systems than all the other observatories in the world combined.
We had just sat through a truly marvellous program on the universe at the science museum in San Francisco, so we were ripe for more info on astronomy and found Lick's many flatscreen, colorful displays on different aspects of the observatory and the universe both informative and visually very attractive.
So it was a memorable road and a serendipitous choice. We got to see the first telescope, a 36 inch one with lenses made in France, and the
modern 120 inch reflector telescope. I'm sorry the pictures of the telescopes are so poor.
All in all, it was a heady discovery for us—serendipity in action.
And further serendipity, which I've been meaning to mention, is that at a bookstore in Walla Walla, we happened upon the 16 disk set of Barbara Kingsolver reading her recent book “The Lacuna”. She's not only one of my favorite writers, she's a fabulous reader and does a variety of accents to bring her characters alive. It's a fiction, but is set in Mexico in the 1930s, and focuses on Trotsky and his wife's exile there, and their connection with the artists Diego Rivera and Freda. So this is how we pass the time between ever-earlier sunsets and the hour at which we can fall asleep. Each night we listen to one disk—about 75 minutes. It's great!
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Michelle Cavanagh
non-member comment
Butterfly Day
Sounds an ideal life!!! M xx