Lick Observatory

Uh, Danny says he's added Outback Astronomer to his, uh, Audible wish list.

Uh, we've got Turk listening from Sunnyvale in California, and he's 35 miles from the Lick Observatory and can see it from his bedroom.

Oh, yeah.

Yep.

The mistake arose in this way.

On page 57, volume 7 of the Bulletin of the Lick Observatory, a publication noted for its accuracy, the sign for one of the motions of Alpha Centauri is printed as a plus instead of a minus, but this fact was not detected in time to be included in the list of errata.

Accordingly this wrong sign was used in computing a table published by Dr. C. L. Stearns in Popular Astronomy, volume 30, page 97, and reproduced on pages 276 and 277 of Climatic Changes.

So far as the main hypothesis set forth in Climatic Changes are concerned, the mistake of the Lick Bulletin is of no importance, as may be judged from the following quotation.

My plane had rammed the wild wilderness on the lower slope of Mount Hamilton.

I struck out on foot for the road which I knew from my maps, ran down the mountain from Lick Observatory to San Jose.

As I walked along in the moonless night, I felt free.

For the first time in many months, no more debts, no more threats of bankruptcy, no more scavenging attorneys.

All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers.

English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August the second.

I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us.

Another example of the monumental nature of these observatories is one of the later ones of James Lick, who essentially decided that he was going to make this his personal monument.

And he is buried underneath the Lick Observatory.

That was part of his stipulation of his providing essentially about a billion dollars in today's terms of funding for that observatory.

And there was another force that I think is worth thinking about.

You start to really see it around the 1870s.

You start to see a number of characters emerge on that scene.

You have the Lick Observatory in 1876.

Lick is the richest man in California and makes his money in property speculation before the gold rush.