Campus & community, Campus news

Can UC’s Lick Observatory be saved?

By Public Affairs

“I’m fighting in part for the next generation, and I’m not going to go away,” says UC Berkeley Professor of Astronomy Alex Filippenko in a Daily Californian feature on the future of UC’s Lick Observatory, near San Jose.

Lick Observatory

Lick Observatory, atop Mt. Hamilton

UC Office of the President recently announced plans to phase out funding for the facility by 2018. Supporters of that decision say that Lick is outdated. Filippenko and other opponents consider the observatory, used by UC students to conduct research, an asset vital to education and technological advances in the field of astronomy.

He, along with other UC faculty members, students and administrators, are quoted in the piece, which delves into significant cuts to the UC research budget in recent years, and the decision to defund Lick, which was constructed atop Mt. Hamilton in the mid 1870s.

Read the full article here.