December’s weather has been unkind, but today in Syracuse it got up to 10°C for the first time since late November, and it wasn’t raining. Gloomy overcast, but, you know, December. And worse is forecast for the next week or so, so I took a my first bike ride of the month.
Had my ride been on my virtual route heading away from San Jose, it would have involved a slog right up a mountain:
California route 130
… on a road with no shoulders at all, evidently. Probably wouldn’t have covered as much distance as I did on the flat in Syracuse.
Worth the effort, though, because you know what they put on mountain tops?
Lick Observatory, 1902
Observatories!
Actually they didn’t put observatories on mountain tops until 1876, when Lick Observatory’s construction began. This one was the first. Named for James Lick, who was… an astronomer? Of course not; he was the wealthy donor. The observatory’s original 91 cm (36") telescope was the world’s largest refractor until Yerkes (remember Yerkes?) was built, and it was used to discover Amalthea, the first Jupiter moon discovered after Galileo.
Lick telescope, 1889
More than 130 years later, Lick is still a site of major astronomical research. One wonders what James Lick would have thought of one of their telescopes, named Automated Planet Finder, a fully robotic 2.4 meter (94 inch) reflector designed to search for extrasolar planets.
I continued down the other side of Mt. Hamilton, picking up the first 23 km of Leg 38. Tomorrow we get rain, Thursday we get a high temperature of 0°C (32°F). `Tis the season.
A map showing my progress is here, a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 37.334°N, 121.476°W.
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