Earthwalk Day 1221 (27 May 2025), 12,132 km: Mount Wilson Observatory

Well.

I mentioned a week and a half ago I was recovering from a medical procedure and that would be curtailing my activities for a few days. About a week ago I resumed walking with a relatively short walk on a level path along the Erie Canal… and I somehow strained a calf muscle. No idea how, just all of a sudden it was hurting. So I took the next three days off, and by Friday last week it felt fine, which was good, because I was heading off that day to the Marlboro Morris Ale for a weekend of dancing. I don’t count dancing as walking steps though (just because it feels perverse to me to claim distance for an activity that doesn’t actually cover any real distance — that plus my walking stride length isn’t applicable, so figuring out an equivalent walking distance is hard). But there was a fair amount of walking over the weekend, too, which I did count — it was, nonetheless, well below my usual. All in all, it’s been a week and a half of underperforming, distance-wise.

Nonetheless, I did finish Leg 43 on Friday. Admittedly only a 23 km leg, and it took me nine days to do it, but it got done. I arrived at Mount Wilson Observatory.

Mount Wilson’s 60-inch (1.5 m) telescope was the largest operational telescope in the world from 1908 to 1917, when it was superseded by Mount Wilson’s 100-inch (2.5 m) reflector. The latter was used by Edwin Hubble to prove the Andromeda Nebula is a galaxy external to the Milky Way and to show the Universe is expanding; by Fritz Zwicky to show evidence for the existence of dark matter; and by Seth Nickolson to discover two satellites of Jupiter. Both telescopes are still in use, but no longer for research — they are now visual scopes for public use. In addition there currently are a solar telescope and an interferometer array, the latter having been used to capture the first image of the surface of a main sequence star other than the Sun.

I’m continuing northward through the mountains on Angeles Forest Highway, away from Los Angeles. I considered a bike ride today but decided that might be a little ambitious after the weekend, so I walked, putting me at about the 23 km mark for Leg 44. After that cluster of destinations near LA, I’m heading to ones a little further apart. My spreadsheet thinks Leg 44 will take me about 18 days, but that’s based on my rather dismal pace of the last thirty days. I think it’ll be solidly faster.

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: 34.335°N, 118.112°W.