On top of a peak in Santa Clara County, California, in the vaults of one of the world’s first mountaintop observatories, around 150,000 photographic plates bear witness to the early history of modern astronomy. “It’s almost like Aladdin’s cave in there,” says Paul Lyman, a resident astronomer at Lick Observatory. “There are logs where astronomers record the discovery of entire new worlds. I found a record of Sputnik going over the observatory just two weeks after it had launched in 1957.” In August, as wildfires swept through California, these treasures…
