Visited Mount Wilson
I've been to Mount Wilson before, but I've never actually taken the guided tour of the facility's biggest telescopes. So last week, I did that!
It was genuinely fantastic. The drive up there was nuts - we came up through the cloud layer, which was a bonkers experience all on its own, and something I probably would have paid for even without the Mount Wilson tour. There's a moment on the way to the observatory where you cross a mountain pass, and the clouds were pouring over this ridge from the south to the north side of the mountains in this insane visible torrent of fast-moving mist. It was incredible shit. And then the views from the top were amazing:
The tour of the facility was also pretty great. There is not a ton of active science going on up here anymore, and it's mostly being maintained as a kind of science museum. But the telescopes are all still kept completely functional using historical technology... so the Snow solar telescope is still running on a nearly 100-year-old DC motor, and there's still a retiree in the other solar telescope drawing sunspots every single day by hand:
The retirees in the telescopes are some of the coolest elements of the trip. There's a bunch of volunteers working here who have the skills to operate the telescopes - a process which does require them to sometimes scale the entire solar scope and adjust things in it by hand, sometimes several times throughout the day. They also are so clearly enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the material that just being around them is kind of an incredible experience.
The machinery is also great. The tour is normally the only way to get into the interior of the main dome, where the largest telescope is. I strongly recommend getting the tour ticket just so you can get up close to the machines and photograph them. This is a great experience for anyone who works in visual art or with videogames and just wants to see some chunky-ass technology:
To be completely honest: I'd been putting this tour off for a while because it costs $20 USD, which still feels like "a significant amount of money" to me. It is more money than you gotta pay to get into the Museum of Jurassic Technology (currently $15, but it went up recently) or even the Museum of Natural History (Currently $18). You can have a lot of fun in LA for free, too, and most of the places I'd want to go are closer than Mount Wilson. Driving for over an hour to get to the top of the mountain - an exhausting trip - and then paying for a tour felt like a hassle.
But it was worth it! I don't know that I'll do it again, but I was very glad to have finally done it. I guess $20 also isn't as much as it used to be. There's a lot of sandwiches on sale in LA for $20 now, and I still reel every time I see them. I definitely did get more out of this tour than a sandwich, and I'm satisfied!
