6. Februar 2026: The silence of the dome
Guest post by Aleks Scholz, Observatory Director
In the summer of 2013, when I started my job at the observatory, the Twin Dome was embedded in an SEP field.
In the words of Douglas Adams, an SEP field “relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain’. The thing that is embedded in an SEP field is somebody else’s problem, short SEP. The Twin Dome was like a blind spot, people walked past it every day, but they didn’t seem to see it, it was, in principle, not there. For most of us, anyway. Until I opened it.
At that point the Twin Dome has been used as a storage place for two decades. Everything that couldn’t find a place elsewhere was just moved to the Twin Dome. The building was treated like a bottomless hole, or a cosmological singularity. You move something you don’t want to deal with into the Twin Dome, and it just disappears. But since the space inside the dome was decidedly finite, it looked rather messy. It is one of my deepest regrets that I did not take any pictures of the inside of the dome. I keep telling myself that I couldn’t take pictures because the dome didn’t have windows, or any lights back then. Which is true, by the way.
Then I decided that the Twin Dome is really my problem. Over the next few years I managed to sort out the Twin Dome for a new future, then encountered problems, then forgot about it again. There are clear indications that I wasn’t the first to struggle finding a relationship with the Twin Dome. This cycle went on for years, until Tim Fitzpatrick came and decided that the Twin Dome was not actually a problem, but a feature. The rest is documented here in this blog, if you go backwards in time. Anyway, this is really my first picture of the inside of the dome, from spring 2014, showing the Twin Dome as it entered its new post-singularity life.
It is now February 2026. It has been almost a year since we last talked about the Twin Dome. During this year, the Twin Dome was mostly closed and unused. We really should have talked about it more, but it is difficult to talk about empty spaces and nothingness (which is not a commentary on my day job as astronomer, by the way). During the past year, the Twin Dome was improved in ways that will not be very impressive, but help us enormously moving forward. We bought a container, to store most of the things that took up space around the dome. The plinth in the dome was removed, reducing the number of trip hazards in the dome to zero. The dome was cleaned and checked. It was an unplanned hiatus, but not entirely without purpose. We learned a lot during that year, about the dome, and about ourselves. And in the larger scheme of things, it was almost certainly just a short blip.
Because the Twin Dome is about to experience a re-birth, of sorts, another one. On March 14th, as part of the traditional Open Night at the Observatory, we are going to open the dome again to visitors, led by our artist in residence Tim Fitzpatrick. I don’t know yet what Tim is going to show, but I’m very curious to find out. Come and join us.