Observatories present an interesting conundrum: they’re sophisticated and high-tech hubs of scientific activity, some of the largest and best-engineered facilities in the universe. At the same time, they also work best when marooned in the middle of nowhere. By necessity, telescopes and the people who work at them can be subjected to some brutal extremes of the elements. Sarah Tuttle, an astronomer whose research includes building telescope instruments, summed it up well: “We take these high-precision scientific instruments and then just torture them.”
