Unraveling cosmic mysteries from an otherworldly ‘little town’

Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton has telescopes pointed toward other worlds, but it’s pretty otherworldly itself.

And despite lasers that can rob the unwary of eyesight, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, wildfires, blizzards and dizzying drops beside a twisty, 19-mile access road, two dozen people live and work on the scrub-covered mountaintop here, helping illuminate and unravel cosmic mysteries.

With a high-pitched whirr, a swath of the massive white dome containing Lick’s Shane telescope rolls up like a four-story garage door to expose the giant instrument to the twilight sky. Scarcely 45 minutes later, resident astronomer Elinor Gates has already used light-wavelength data to identify a quasar — the galaxy core where gases and space dust go out in a blaze of luminous glory just before they’re sucked inside a black hole.

“We’ve made a new observation nobody’s made before,” Gates says in the screen-filled control room beside the Shane. “It’s mission accomplished.”

Dozens more quasar-hunting missions will follow on this night. Gates calls herself a morning person, and she’s been up since 5:30 a.m. But on this, as well as on many other nights, she’s a 24-hour person, remaining awake till dawn analyzing data, while a technician at a work station beside her points the Shane — with its 10-foot-wide mirror — at targets in the sky that could be stars as near as 150,000 light years away or quasars billions of light years distant. Around 6:30 p.m., Gates guzzles the rest of a can of Coke. “I have some tea with me,” she says. “I need to stop drinking caffeine at 2 a.m.-ish or so to make sure I actually sleep when I finally get to.”

The images and graphs on her screens tell Gates whether gases around an outer-space object shine with color patterns like quasars or like stars. Gates is researching dust-shrouded quasars. For each new observation, she’ll later peer deep into her data to try to help answer fundamental questions about how the universe works: Is being cloaked in dust a stage for a quasar? Or does it happen when galaxies merge?

Since University of California-owned Lick went operational in 1888, increasing light from the growing Bay Area metropolis below has come to interfere with astronomy. Still, says Andrew Fraknoi, former head of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and currently an astronomy professor at the University of San Francisco, “it’s a remarkable thing that being so close to San Jose and its city lights, it’s still able, partly because of its location and partly because of the clever people designing its instruments, to do important work.” Much space research, like Gates’, does not require the world’s largest telescopes or darkest nights, and Lick’s array also includes the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope, famed for early detection of the star explosions called supernovas.

Next to Gates in the control room is Dan Espinosa, telescope technician and Lick’s chief mechanic. “How many other places do you get to use a jeweler’s screwdriver and a 15-ton crane to adjust the same instrument?” says Espinosa, who has a mechanical engineering degree from San Jose State University, and unlike morning-person Gates, describes himself as a “natural-born vampire.”

Espinosa likes numbers. He figures he climbs almost 1,000 vertical feet a day on stairways around the facility’s nine operable telescopes. He once tried counting all the ball bearings in the observatory machinery, but gave up well into the triple digits. One telescope alone, the 57-foot Great Lick Refractor built in the 1880s and housed in the main building visible from much of the Bay Area, has 130 ball bearings, he says, “and every single one of them’s got to be greased.”

On a recent afternoon, Espinosa has grease on his face and hands, but he’s also often tasked with putting his meaty mitts to non-mechanical work, “beating on software to make sure it’s doing what it was designed to do.”

Espinosa may sometimes be found in his lair, a cave-like office and repair shop beneath the Shane where the cool air smells of oil and grease and hulking metal-work machines gleam in the fluorescent light: tools of the trade for a mechanic caring for sophisticated but often aging gear.

On a late afternoon, Espinosa is crouched outside by an open electrical box, working on the cooling system for the Automated Planet Finder, the world’s first robotic telescope capable of detecting rocky planets outside our solar system that might support life. Espinosa holds up a length of wire extending from the box, its black sheathing bearing fresh little scars. “This is my current little nightmare,” he says. “The mice have been at this.”

Mice, in the eastern Santa Clara County hills, often mean rattlesnakes. A stone’s throw from Espinosa, a sign on a building warns staff and visitors to give the reptiles “some respect.” Other placards advise people they’re in “mountain lion habitat,” so “keep children close,” and, “if attacked, fight back.” Brush fires occur regularly on the mountain, and the 2020 SCU Lightning Complex firestorm nearly took Lick out. Last winter, heavy snow forced technicians to trudge through deep drifts to maintain sensitive equipment, while the domes stayed shut for weeks.

“Not everyone can live up here,” says Gates, a Lick resident for a quarter century. Two other astronomers live at the observatory, plus four telescope operators, three technicians and other staff — plus a few partners and one home-schooled 7-year-old, making for a population of 25.

“In our tiny town, we have neighborhoods,” Gates says, rattling off Rattlesnake Ridge, Tortilla Flats, Kepler Peak — and Downtown, where the visitors are noisiest and homes have signs saying, “Quiet Please, Day Sleepers inside.”

But many who conduct research at Lick don’t have to live there. Most any day, students and astronomers are visiting or collaborating remotely with scientists on the mountain.

On this particular day, Gates is joined on the quasar search via video by Piper Walker, 22, an astrophysics major at UC Santa Cruz. Gates gets Walker to give target coordinates to Espinosa. Computers bleep and bloop as two cameras on the telescope start and stop eight-minute exposures. Gates performs a preliminary analysis on the results: They’re positive. Walker, from her Santa Cruz bedroom, has helped identify her first quasar.

“I wish I was there in person, but this is still really cool,” Walker says. She is scheduled to study at Lick in January and February, Gates notes, and tells her she may get to “ride the dome” — stand on the catwalk of the Shane dome as it rotates. “You can watch the scenery go by,” Gates says.

Meanwhile, at the Nickel telescope in the main building, Eliot Young is preparing for his two minutes of truth. Principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute’s Space Studies Department in Boulder, Colorado, he has come to Lick for just two days, to observe Uranus’ moon Titania as it passes briefly in front of a bright star, a rare event. No one knows if Titania has an atmosphere; how starlight bends around it, Young hopes, will show him if it does.

Next to the door in the control room for the Nickel — which is also used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — a big red button warns, “LASER EMERGENCY STOP.” This telescope, like the Shane, has a powerful laser used to zap the atmosphere and make a “false star” reference point for canceling out atmospheric turbulence. Enter the dome at the wrong time, and you could be struck blind.

Visitors like Young can stay in on-site dorms. The observatory no longer has a dining hall, but Young stopped on his way up to buy milk and cereal for breakfast and canned soup and baked potatoes to heat up in the kitchen. Residents of the homes scattered around the domes at Lick can see Yosemite’s Half Dome on a clear day, but the closest groceries are nearly an hour away in San Jose.

“I’m up and down the mountain at least once a week,” says Gates, who has a boyfriend in San Mateo and performs with Lyric Theater in San Jose — she’s a soprano. “I always look for the wildlife and the flowers.