It's lights out at a cosmic restaurant | Hacker News Reader

It's lights out at a cosmic restaurant

nytimes.com

56 pointsBrajeshwar25 comments

"... But as the popularity of remote observing from home cuts into observatories’ customer bases, the practice has waned...."

Echoes of the impact of wfh on restaurants near offices here. I suppose it's much nicer to not have to schlep yourself out to the middle of nowhere but something is lost.

This is something I grapple with a lot. Convenience is probably an improvement, but now the journey is shorter to all the destinations.

after awhile the market will adjust and you'll wind up with more options near home, in your neighborhood, instead of downtown. sounds like a win to me

I'm not sure how true that is. I live in a Boston exurb--OK, adjacent to a small 40K person city--and there's been no particular renaissance of local eating places. Just the usual mostly takeout and people presumably eating at home.

I take the contrarian position, that the market won't adjust and intentional effort needs to be put into holding on to these experiences through marketing, pricing, etc. WFH/remote are very important for providing workers flexibility and freedom with high value, but so is preserving experiences even if folks must travel to them.

I work remote so that I can explore (because lifetime is finite and there is so too much to see, and too much to do) while still providing value and collecting some freedom tokens, and there is an objective loss when these experiences sunset or evaporate. Jim Haynes comes to mind. How to preserve these experiences for future explorers, I leave up to folks smarter and more determined than I, but I do have freedom tokens to spend with them.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55703174

I'm not sure what you're arguing. If I want to see good theatre and eat at good restaurants I mostly have to travel to them, maybe a modest distance but certainly not a few minutes. I don't reasonably expect to access them--for the most part, although there's some good music near me especially in the summer--around where I live.

Yeah, that's fair, apologies my thought was half baked. I think its really a story about places we want to cultivate, where we can cultivate those places, and who can make a go of it in a changing world where locality is not as rigid as it once was.

One of the places I dwell part of the year is within walking distance (5-10 minutes) of amazing authentic restaurants (Indian, Mexican, Bolivian, etc), a world class art center and theater, more than one college campus. The urban core of this town can support these businesses and experiences without a whole lot of intention, because of the local population and that somewhat static demand.

In the cases of this restaurant, at an observatory, it takes a lot more effort to keep it running as an ongoing concern (as a destination experience), but those businesses and experiences are valuable too. How to keep them going (so we collectively continue to enjoy and experience) merits more understanding, imho, and patrons must be ready to spend to provide support.

Again, I apologize for not cohesively expressing the thought initially, I hope this follow up has made the idea more cogent.

Not necessarily, in the end, customer-density might be to low on both sides to maintain a restaurant.

I ate at the Monastery many times during my postdoc a decade ago. With all but the 200” telescope fully robotic, it was already a pared down experience from the glory days reminisced about in the article. Still, it was and is a beautiful site, and the hospitality and proximity to history always made it a memorable experience.

> 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.

A real life Milliways! [0]

[0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Milliways

It's certainly the end at a restaurant in the universe.

While it doesn't quite recreate the dinner atmosphere of the article, the Mt. Wilson Observatory hosts a range of events[1] every year, mostly to support the maintenance of site. If you're in southern California, pay it a visit!

[1]: https://www.mtwilson.edu/events/

They have nights where you can look through the big telescope. As far as I know it's the biggest telescope that still has a viewfinder. It was fun looking at Saturn and Mars with such a big device.

I went there last summer and the site is large but not unwalkable. Maybe they could have opened it to tourists. Other than the nearby campground you have to drive down the mountain quite a bit to get to the nearest store/town.

Used to live on Mt. Palomar just below the Observatory. Magical place and time in my life. Sometimes I would drive my old Benz down the hill to Pauma valley or further south through Valley Center into Escondido or sometimes north to Temecula. But often I found myself going up over the hill into the small and quaint town of Julian.

The Observatory was a place I often found myself visiting at night, to enjoy star watching events and the dinner services were equally excellent and magical.

Fond memories. Sad to see it go.

So they did let the public eat there

My dad saw the big mirror go past his school on its special railcar, when it came from Corning.

"But often I found myself going up over the hill into the small and quaint town of Julian."

Julian recently had a rather important geological/gemological discovery happen - crystals of emerald, bisected by citrine - yet it's all one and the same crystal, and it wasn't caused by the emerald breaking and citrine filling the fracture. The citrine acts as a sort of 'barrier' where you can see inverse concentrations of various elements on either side of the citrine.

Apparently, there is a vegetarian restaurant next to the general store past the campground.

Other isolated research places had things like that. Fermilab has (had?) Chez Leon. The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton is proud of their wine cellar.

Fermi is a treat for the architecture alone.

The cafeteria at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA is pretty good and often serves excellent seafood -- when I've been there for a course or conference the food was a high point.

They also had a bar and we had some interesting times where the locals came to get in fights with scientists.

The Paranal Observatory in Chile has an entire (non public) hotel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESO_Hotel

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