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From Astronomy News:
A piece of astronomical history is closing its doors this year: Yerkes Observatory, which opened in 1897, will cease operations on October 1, 2018. It’s truly one of the great pieces of scientific history and architecture. Yerkes Observatory is an impressive late-19th-century structure, housing what is still the largest refracting (lens-based) telescope in the world. The primary lens in the main Yerkes telescope is 40 inches (102 centimeters) in diameter. The observatory stands on the shore of Geneva Lake in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, just across the border from Illinois. The land it sits on is park-like, and the building itself is a marvel of astronomical architecture and engineering from the dawn of the modern era of big science. In many ways, this closure isn’t surprising. Yerkes is very much a relic of a past era, not the type of observatory that is used for major discoveries in the modern day. The University of Chicago, which owns and operates the facility, has decided the observatory is not worth the expense of maintaining it.
(http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/03/yerkes-observatory-is-closing-its-doors)
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