Mount Wilson Observatory Threated by Fire

UPDATE HERE --- The Mount Wilson Observatory, the birthplace of modern astronomy, is being threated by ranging fire high in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles today [live webcam and UStream]. The fire is now meters from the observatory domes. If the telescopes survive the fire, the clean-up of the mirrors will be costly and take lots of down time. The historic Mount Wilson Observatory holds some of the largest telescopes ever built in the world. Firefights are now working to perhaps save the facility.

It was at Mount Wilson, in 1917, that Harlow Shapley identified the centre of the Milky Way using the 60-inch Telescope, showing that the Sun is one of our galaxy's peripheral stars. And in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble used the observatory's 100-inch Hooker Telescope to prove that the Milky Way is one galaxy among many, and that the Universe is expanding.