#CaltechTogether: Rick Burruss

“At the moment, we're operating with 24 individuals. A little more than half of those live on the compound on top of Palomar Mountain. It's a conifer forest, and Caltech provides 13 cottages, built in the mid- to late-1930s, for 13 staff and their families. I'm the superintendent, so I'm the person in charge. We make sure the cottages, the electricity to the cottages, the propane for heating, the network, all those kinds of things, are maintained. And obviously the operations of all the domes are maintained, and that's my responsibility to make sure that happens. We have three main domes with three large telescopes. We're a 24/7 operation. I think it was on March 17 [of 2020] that we sent all non-cottage staff to work from home. We also kicked the observers out and said you all have to observe remotely. So, all four of our 200-inch partners [Caltech, JPL, Yale, and the observatories of China] since May have been observing at the 200-inch telescope from home; they're not coming here. We affectionately call it ‘pajama observing.’ We have a whole protocol in place here to keep people distant, to be very careful who goes where. We came up with creative solutions that keep people in their own little what we call home areas. It’s vital that everyone follows the protocol, so that if one person gets sick, we don't have to close the whole operation down because the entire staff gets infected. We're like a little family here. We take care of each other, we just do. My wife was out of eggs a few weeks ago, and within 30 minutes we had two people bringing eggs to our front door. That's just the kind of thing that happens up here.”

Rick Burruss is the site superintendent at Palomar Observatory, which is owned by Caltech. 

#CaltechTogether is a special series of #SoCaltech spotlighting the many ways members of our community are joining together to support one another and to take responsibility for our collective health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.