If you’re about to stay up all night atop a cold mountain, to squint through an eyepiece at shimmering, impossibly distant specks of light or to stare at pixels on a screen, it helps to have eaten a good meal first.
So it was dismaying to learn recently that Palomar Observatory in Southern California, home to the famous 200-inch Hale Telescope — the “Big Eye” — has closed the kitchen that served elegant sit-down meals to astronomers during their observing runs. It was simply getting too expensive, the California Institute of Technology, which owns and operates Palomar, announced in May.
Thus ends one of the most endearing traditions in astronomy: dinner with your colleagues, a chance to brainstorm, gossip, learn what everybody else is doing, hear old stories, and just hang out together on cloudy nights. From now on astronomers checking into the Monastery, the lodge where observers stay while using the telescopes on Palomar, will have to make do with frozen meals that they can heat up and eat on their own.
“To me, the Monastery was (and still is for those of us who deign to, or must, travel there) the focal point of non-telescope time there,” Rebecca Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History who has spent hundreds of nights on Palomar, said in an email.
“The dinners, finishing before sunset, were a marvelous tradition, expertly prepared and served, where one could meet people from all over working on various different projects,” Dr. Oppenheimer added. “The cooks gave the whole thing a very special and warm atmosphere, and became friends, really. Even on cloudy nights, one might see them later in the evening, perhaps with a nice fire going in the fireplace.”