university has reclaimed most of the books, the telescope's research time has been replaced with school tours, and the scientists have trickled 100 miles south to the main campus. Only a handful of researchers remain, and many don't stay year-round.

"When I first came here, new faculty had a choice of where to go, Chicago or up here," said observatory director Kyle Cudworth, who has worked at Yerkes since 1974. "But by 10 years later, they were not given a choice. They were strongly encouraged to go to campus."

Despite the exodus, Yerkes is still an active center of research and engineering. Cudworth and his former student Rick Rees (now a professor at Westfield State University in Massachusetts) use a century's worth of observations from the big telescope to track motions of stars in clusters, work that can be done only at Yerkes. And engineers working in the observatory's ancient cellars are constructing new instruments to fly on airborne telescopes.

Wired.com recently took a tour of this majestic, history-rich observatory to learn why it claims the title "the birthplace of modern astronomy," and what will happen to it now.

Image: Lisa Grossman/Wired.com

Authors: Lisa Grossman

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