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Description
View of the old dormitory with the "steep path of cleated boards, known as the 'chicken-walk,' which leads from the road-way to the dormitory." (From: David Pickering, "The Astronomical Fraternity of the World, part XIII" in Popular Astronomy, vol. 43 (1935) p.144.) Near the foot of the chicken walk is a small shed with a sign above the door that reads "Fire hose." Visible behind the dormitory is the main building of the observatory. The Lick Observatory building was designed by architect S.E. Todd of Washington, DC, in the Italian Renaissance style with the use of deep entablatures and moldings, and a pediment over the west door. The construction of the Lick Observatory building began in January 1880 under the direction of Thomas Fraser, James Lick's agent. To level the top of Mount Hamilton, Fraser had the top thirty feet of the mountain removed with black powder explosives. Workers then moved, by hand, an estimated 40 thousand tons of rock they had loosened. Masons built a kiln next to a clay bed near the summit and fired the bricks for the building. All of the heavy materials for the dome and telescope mounting were hauled up the mountain by wagon team and lifted into place with simple mechanical aids. http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/butowsky5/astro4b.htm Scanned with Microtek Scanmaker 1000XL Pro; as a 600 dpi TIFF image in 8-bit Grayscale. Auto Level image processing applied and compressed into JPEG format using Photoshop CS3.
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