While the weekend night telescope viewing is free, the museum costs $20 for adults and $19 for youth and seniors. Inside the museum you can pilot a rover spacecraft and see an actual Russian Soyuz descent module. You can also take in the views of the San Francisco Bay and San Francisco beyond that. For its part, the eight-inch Alvan Clark refractor telescope dates to 1883, so it lets you look at the stars as astronomers did 140 years ago. The most modern of these, the research-grade 36-inch telescope, offers tremendous night sky views.
#Lick observatory for free#
You can look through its telescopes for free on clear Friday or Saturday nights between 7:30 and 10:30 PM. The Chabot Space & Science Center is a museum dedicated to space, which also houses three telescopes - so it’s the perfect place to learn about observatories to begin your road trip. The best observatories in California Chabot Space & Science Center - Oakland, California However you choose to explore, these are the best US observatories you can visit on a trip across the country. These can be part of your cross-country astro road trip, or you can split your travel into a western and eastern US observatory tour. The road trip also includes a handful of eastern observatories. Rather, this road trip begins in California - where the Big Bang Theory was developed - and takes you across several western states, where a dry climate and tall elevations provide the best observing conditions. However, this US observatory is neither open to visitors nor easy to work into a continental road trip. Keck Observatory atop Hawaii’s nearly 14,000-foot Mauna Kea peak.
The world’s largest on-land optical telescope is at the W.