Mount Wilson Observatory Status

Mount Wilson Observatory is CLOSED.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, ALL TOURS, EVENTS, AND TELESCOPE VIEWING have been suspended until further notice.

Due to the Bobcat fire, a large portion of the Angeles National Forest is CLOSED, including ALL trails to Mount Wilson.  For more information, please read the  U.S. Forest Service closure order.

The Observatory is still recovering from the Bobcat fire. We look forward to the day we can reopen and allow visitors access to the Observatory grounds. Stay tuned.

To watch a 9/21 timelapse video of the Bobcat fire looking west towards the broadcast towers click here. For a view to the north from the same time frame click here. Click here to watch another scary timelapse from the night of 9/17, when the Observatory was in greatest jeopardy. The firefighters are our heroes and we owe them our existence. They are true professionals, artists with those backfires, and willing to put themselves at considerable risk to protect us. We thank them!!!!

Watch an extraordinary record of the Bobcat Fire here. It is a 360 degree, panoramic, time-lapse video of the fire as it started and eventually came up and around the Observatory. The video, “Bobcat Fire Time Lapse from Mt. Wilson 9/4/20-9/19/20” was created by Siobhán Dougall, who stitched together 10,500 images recorded by our four HPWREN tower cams.

The Observatory gets its first big snow of the winter on December 28. About a foot!

The December Issue of our Quarterly Newsletter, Reflections is Now Available Online.

Click here to read the December issue of our newsletter and get a quick update on our status during the pandemic and post-Botcat Fire era.

The feature article is on the fire, which lingered in the canyons below Mount Wilson right up until our first major storm put an end to it with a blanket of snow on the 27th and 28th of December. It burned for more than three months, after starting on Labor Day weekend. The second article is on Betelgeuse and Baade. Betelgeuse is the first star ever measured (other than the Sun), a remarkable achievement made at the Observatory 100 years ago this December. (To read the first article about this milestone in astronomy, see last December’s issue of Reflections here. The follow-up article on how Walter Adams, the second director of the Observatory, figured out how to measure distances to thousands of stars, a prerequisite to determining their sizes can be found here.) Betelgeuse, a red supergiant, is on the shortlist of “nearby” stars that are expected to go supernova in the next 100,000 years. Walter Baade, one of the Observatory’s more famous astronomers, observed his first supernova one hundred years ago from his native Germany. He and Fritz Zwicky at Mount Wilson brought supernova research into the modern era,

A letter from our Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Sam Hale, updates us on the Observatory’s status and progress in a difficult year.

We know that many of our supporters are struggling with the pandemic and economic downturn this year, so we are especially thankful to all who have helped us “weather the storm.” All who donated from July 1 to December 1 are honored in the newsletter. All these donations, large and small, have helped make up for some of our shortfall in revenue this year. Those who joined us as members are also deeply appreciated and are listed on our Website. We thank them all for supporting science, education, and the historic preservation of this remarkable Observatory high above Los Angeles–where we discovered our place in the Universe!

A publicity photo of astronomer Edwin Hubble guiding Mount Wilson’s 100-inch Telescope in 1924, shortly after he proved the existence of distant galaxies. Photo: Carnegie Observatories/ Huntington Library.

Subscribe to Mount Wilson Observatory News for updates on what is (or isn’t) happening on the mountain in 2020. Click here.

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)!

Comet Neowise captured by Mount Wilson’s Blake Estes on the Evening of July 17th. Note the beautiful, blue ion tail.

Mount Wilson Observatory’s Blake Estes imaged Comet Neowise as it rose above the San Gabriel Mountains into the morning twilight around 4:45 AM, on Monday, July 13. His images, with the 100-inch Telescope dome in the foreground, were taken from the 150-foot Solar Tower Telescope.

Another shot of the Comet Neowise by Estes. To the right is the bright star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus.

Another shot with the lights of Los Angeles.  The comet made its closest approach to Earth on July 23, and is fading rapidly as it speeds away from the Sun towards the far reaches of our Solar System, not to return for 6,000+ years.

Mount Wilson Observatory’s New Membership Program

Join the Observatory  as a member! By doing so, you get a number of benefits and you help us renew this historic mountaintop, so that it may inspire well into the future. We aim to build a larger community to keep us moving forward with educational STEM programs, undergraduate research, public outreach, ongoing scientific research, and restoration of our 116-year-old observatory.

Please consider becoming a member in 2020, to help us through this year. If you can. Sign up for the individual membership, family membership, or a higher level, all named after one of our famous astronomers. Sign up is easy. Click here to go to our membership page.

The centennial, paper architectural model of the 100-inch Telescope is now available to download for a small donation to Mount Wilson Observatory. Click here to go to the model page.

The Observatory’s founder, George Ellery Hale, built four telescopes, each one in succession becoming the largest in the world. Here they are shown to the same scale. His first was the 40-inch refractor at Yerkes  (in Wisconsin) on the left, but then he began building the more revolutionary–and more compact–reflector telescopes, using a large mirror instead of a lens. His next two are on Mount Wilson, the 60-inch and the 100-inch. (While not quite as grand as his last, these two had the light-gathering power for astronomers to discover our place in the expanding Universe.) His fourth, the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar, is represented on the right by one of Russell Porter’s famous cutaway drawings. This image has been reversed and extended on the left side for a better comparison of the relative sizes of the full domes. Hale’s telescopes were the biggest from 1897, when Yerkes opened, to 1993, when the Keck telescope in Hawaii was completed–a span of 96 years. To see these drawings enlarged, click here. Drawing credits: University of Chicago/Yerkes Observatory, Carnegie Observatories, Palomar Observatory/Caltech.