After ascending to almost 6000 feet in tight switchbacks, through dense woods of huge live oak, manzanita and pines, you come to the three telescopes, as white as the snow along the side of the trail.
Visitors can look inside the largest, a great cavern dominated by the massive Hale telescope, with which astrono-mers made discoveries beyond imagining. Like quasars! One revealed that most galaxies - including our own - have a black hole at their center. Those wavy lines at lower right in this illustraion show where scientists trained Hale's eye. The illustration is in the little museum nearby, which is overshadowed by 
a more terrestrial wonder, a perfect cone of a tree which turned out to be a juvenile giant sequoia! I didn't know these other symbols of transcendance could grow anywhere but the flanks of the Sierra Nevada, certainly not in our southern California neighborhood. Wormholes in space and time...! The local wildlife saw an unexpected opportunity: the far side of another sequoia, on the other side of the museum, turned out to be a woodpeckers vault, embedded with acorns. Worlds within worlds!
Visitors can look inside the largest, a great cavern dominated by the massive Hale telescope, with which astrono-mers made discoveries beyond imagining. Like quasars! One revealed that most galaxies - including our own - have a black hole at their center. Those wavy lines at lower right in this illustraion show where scientists trained Hale's eye. The illustration is in the little museum nearby, which is overshadowed by 
a more terrestrial wonder, a perfect cone of a tree which turned out to be a juvenile giant sequoia! I didn't know these other symbols of transcendance could grow anywhere but the flanks of the Sierra Nevada, certainly not in our southern California neighborhood. Wormholes in space and time...! The local wildlife saw an unexpected opportunity: the far side of another sequoia, on the other side of the museum, turned out to be a woodpeckers vault, embedded with acorns. Worlds within worlds!