U. of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory to close after 120 years

Yerkes is a special place. I had the privilege of spending the night there as a student, and while I know nothing about astronomy, it was one of the highlights of my undergrad. The gorgeous grounds, the fairytale/museum architecture, the creepy catwalks and spiral staircases connecting the telescopes, the computer room filled with VAXen (only time I’ve seen a VT200 in person), and the welcoming staff made it a hell of a trip. Yerkes embodies the hacker ethos. There’s automation around each telescope still in operation that’s clearly built by staff familiar with Arduinos and home automation rather than some government contractor. The platforms of the domes rotate; one of them is rigged with a handheld barcode scanner to find its place among the labels taped to the outside wall. Clever mixes of the original early-20th-century electrical control panels and 2010s electronics abound.

My friends in astrophysics have worked on equipment in its basement machine shop that is now in space. All of them credit Yerkes with motivating them to enter or stay in the field. There is enormous backlash on social media, and a glimmer of hope that Yerkes might operate in substantially the same way independently or under different ownership.

I’m deeply skeptical of historic preservation, but if there were ever a place that needed to be landmarked, it’s this one.

Rather sad news. I hope they do something better with the place than build condos. It's a gorgeous tract and a gorgeous building.

That is a shame. My great-grandfather was an astronomer there when it opened in 1897. It has a long history of important research.

Should be turned into a hacker space for amateur astronomers.

Is anyone interested in having an HN meetup for a science tour prior to closure? I will be taking my family next month, but wouldn't mind arranging something for those HN readers in the area.

That's the end of an era - Yerkes has the largest refracting telescope ever built.

Could they turn it into a museum and planetarium? Such a beautiful building.

This Chicago Tribune article from 5 years ago (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-13/news/ct-met-ye...) gives more details and actually made me quite pessimistic about the future of the building. It says the yearly costs were (then) $400k and that the University floated plans to convert the area and building into luxury condos, only stopped by the local community. Whenever there’s so much potential for making money (on the order of tens of millions of dollars) it’s pretty much inevitable that it will happen sooner or later.

As others have said this is incredibly sad, I guess the best case scenario at this point is for it to be a condo, at least the great building can be saved.

But what really puzzles me is that how this great resource cannot be put to better use. Yes, the telescope may "no longer contribute directly to the research mission" but it still blows your $300 home telescope out of the water! I, for one, would pay at least $250 a night for a modest room if I am allowed to use that beast (with supervision, of course). I guess there would be tons of amateur astronomers who would feel the same.

I understand U of C does not have the bandwidth to do this, but why doesn't a local startup/philanthropist/whatever step up?

It's too bad that space-based telescopes are so rare. Imagine if an observatory like this was just an uplink to a satellite in space. That preserves the history and institution while keeping it current in terms of technology.