No Power

The power company will be doing some work in the area and power will be cut to parts of Palomar Mountain today. The observatory will be running on generators and open to the public. The observatory's public affairs office office is slightly off of the compound and not part of the generator's back up grid. In other words, don't bother trying to call me after 8 am as my phones, message machine and Internet will likely be down.

Pictured above is one of the old diesel Enterprise generators that used to serve the observatory 24/7/365. Back in the early days the observatory was totally off of the grid and ran generators full time. The observatory's main office is still called the Power House even though those generators have now been gone for quite a while.