NYT: Famous observatory restaurant closes

Via the New York Times, this sad news: 

If you’re about to stay up all night atop a cold mountain, to squint through an eyepiece at shimmering, impossibly distant specks of light or to stare at pixels on a screen, it helps to have eaten a good meal first.

So it was dismaying to learn recently that Palomar Observatory in Southern California, home to the famous 200-inch Hale Telescope — the “Big Eye” — has closed the kitchen that served elegant sit-down meals to astronomers during their observing runs. It was simply getting too expensive, the California Institute of Technology, which owns and operates Palomar, announced in May.

Thus ends one of the most endearing traditions in astronomy: dinner with your colleagues, a chance to brainstorm, gossip, learn what everybody else is doing, hear old stories, and just hang out together on cloudy nights. From now on astronomers checking into the Monastery, the lodge where observers stay while using the telescopes on Palomar, will have to make do with frozen meals that they can heat up and eat on their own.

“To me, the Monastery was (and still is for those of us who deign to, or must, travel there) the focal point of non-telescope time there,” Rebecca Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History who has spent hundreds of nights on Palomar, said in an email.

I can't imagine how expensive it was (probably quite pricey), but it is really too bad that there wasn't a way to keep this tradition alive.

Makes you wonder if there is a quiet NMR laboratory somewhere that serves a quite mid-evening meal. Probably not.