Palomar Observatory Bids Farwell to its Cosmic Restaurant

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.”

But her most recent visit was “strange and sadly empty,” she said, “having some frozen food at any random time, without the scheduled meal providing a punctuation mark for the start of the night.”

Observatories have long maintained cooks and dining rooms to keep their astronomers fed and productive. When I was an editor at Sky & Telescope magazine in the 1970s, we received a quarterly newsletter from the European Southern Observatory, a consortium based in Munich with telescopes in La Silla in Chile. Along with news from the mountain were mouthwatering menus of what was being served to the astronomers down south.

That was a golden age of eating. But as the popularity of remote observing from home cuts into observatories’ customer bases, the practice has waned.

“Boy, has the quality and care given to food at observatories gone down in the last 40 years,” said Reinhard Genzel, a German astronomer who in 2020 won the Nobel Prize in Physics for research he conducted with the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

Alice Shapley, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, fondly recalled the tubs of Red Vine licorice strings and boxes of animal crackers that helped her get through the long nights at Palomar. These days, astronomers at many observatories are left to fend for themselves at local strip malls.

“Dinners at Palomar were much more fun and filling,” she said.

Big Eye, Big Meal

The 200-inchHale Telescope, which went into operation in 1948, was the biggest and most important telescope on Earth for almost half a century. Everybody who was anybody in astronomy — and even the merely celestial — came through.

Wendy Freedman, an astronomer and former director at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., who is now at the University of Chicago, often used the Palomar telescope. “I remember a memorable dinner with guests Sidney Poitier and Johnny Carson, I think in the late 1980s,” she said in an email. “Monastery staff went out of their way to create an elegant dining room. They probably thought we ate that way all of the time.”

The Palomar meals were a continuation of an even earlier tradition at Mount Wilson Observatory outside Pasadena. The astronomers’ dorm there, a string of plain rooms perched next to a cliff, was the original Monastery, nicknamed such because the mountain and the telescopes were off-limits to women. (One astronomer who managed to breach this limit, Margaret Burbidge, did so by posing as the assistant to her husband, Geoffrey Burbidge, who was strictly a theorist.)

Mount Wilson was the site of the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, the world’s biggest when it was finished in 1917, and the lair of Edwin Hubble, who discovered the expansion of the universe with it. He dressed and spoke like an old British lord, although he was from Missouri, and dinners in the Monastery were on the formal side — no candles, but tablecloths and cloth napkins. Whoever was using the big telescope that night sat at the head of long table, flanked by the observers on the next-largest telescopes.

Their places were anointed by wooden napkin holders. Regular observers like Hubble got wooden rings inscribed with their names. Newbies and graduate students made do with clothespins.

Inspired and emboldened by Hubble’s discoveries the California Institute of Technology built the 200-inch telescope with money from the Rockefeller Foundation and collaborated with the Carnegie Institution in using it. The excitement shifted to Palomar. Its dorm, also christened the Monastery, had thick rugs and a cozy den filled with books. But the formalities of Mount Wilson faded away. No napkin rings; people sat where they wanted.

“There was no particular ceremony involved,” said Tod Lauer, a former Caltech student now at the NOIRLab in Tucson, Ariz. “Caltech was a shirttails-out kind of place that encouraged iconoclastic behavior. There was a bell on the table to be rung to signal to the kitchen — that was about the only tradition.”

Women were allowed but scarce.

Virginia Trimble, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, was a Caltech graduate student at the time and one of the earliest women to visit. Initially she had the whole upstairs of the Monastery to herself; only on her third visit was she permitted to stay downstairs with everyone else.

One night in the late 1970s, Carolyn Porco, a Caltech grad student at the time and later the head of the imaging team on the Cassini mission to Saturn, helped push the cowbell into history. The bell sat on the table, to be rung when the diners were ready for the next course.

“I absolutely hated that damn bell,” Dr. Porco recalled. “To me it was a practice dredged up from a bygone era, redolent of wealth and privilege, snobbery, and classism. I said, ‘I’ll just get up, go into the kitchen, and let them know we’re done.’”

Seated at the table was Allan Sandage, a protégé of Hubble who spent his career on the staff of the Carnegie Observatories. He noted aloud that the cowbell was a longstanding tradition.

“Well, out with the old, in with the new,” Dr. Porco replied.

Hobnobbing With Stars

The dinner conversation varied in subject. “Astronomers spend an awful lot of time yakking about the weather, despite in general not knowing jack about meteorology,” Dr. Lauer said. But the meal was just the appetizer to a night of observing, he added: “However pleasant the dinner was, we were all spring loaded to hit the telescopes as soon as we could.”

Younger astronomers especially benefited from the exchanges.

“As a student it was often hard to get time with the busy Caltech profs and Carnegie astronomers during the usual course of things,” said Abhijit Saha, an astronomer at NOIR who spent more than 100 nights at Palomar as a Caltech graduate student. “The meals at the observatory were the exception. Because they were at a fixed time, and you were expected to be there, it was the one occasion when we got to sit with the ‘demigods’ without an agenda.”

“But more often it was a place where the grandmasters were forced to interact with us lowly students, and a lot was communicated seemingly by osmosis,” Dr. Saha said. “Not just domain knowledge, but the whole culture of what it was to be an astronomer — like parents telling you about the exploits of your grandparents. It was heady stuff!”

You could even be a witness to history. Dr. Sandage, who liked to introduce himself to younger astronomers as the janitor, recalled a night in the 1960s when he and an observing assistant were sitting in the Monastery library waiting for Rudolph Minkowski, an astronomer at Caltech, to come down from the 200-inch Hale telescope. Dr. Minkowski was retiring and had spent the last two nights of his career peering at a faint speck in the sky called 3C 295.

At last he came bounding down the stairs and into the library with a bottle of bourbon and three glasses. He had succeeded in recording a spectrum of light indicating that 3C 295 was the most distant object then known in the universe: a galaxy almost five billion light-years away, fleeing from us at almost half the speed of light. Dr. Minkowski had gone out in a blaze of glory.

The fate of the cowbell is a mystery. And astronomers continue to debate the size and fate of the universe. The distance record set by Dr. Minkowski has been broken again and again, as astronomers working on ever-large telescopes whittle down the distance and time between modern science and the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

They will need all the sustenance they can get from their friends and colleagues. Thanks to the internet, the dinner conversation is now 24/7, if no longer in person.

“Way leads onto way,” Dr. Lauer said. “And any good department of astronomers will always find a new way to sit everyone down together and talk about whatever, with the expectation that it will lead to something.”