Kind of a sad day yesterday, with the announcement of a recommendation to close the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak site. Sac Peak is a delight – a little community of astronmers at the end of a winding mountain road where folks gather every day to study the sun. But it’s getting old, and the shiny new toy is going elsewhere, and the astronomy community, god love ’em, has a much more rational approach for prioritizing limited federal spending than most (at least within the National Science Foundation’s astronomy budget – don’t get me started on NASA), so it looks like there’ s a good chance we’ll see the end of one of New Mexico’s and the nation’s great old observatories.