Halloween

For the most part, astronomers aren’t a superstitious lot. And they certainly don’t believe in ghosts. Yet it would be hard to blame them for getting a few chills on a lonely Halloween night, when the motors groan and the dome rattles in the blustery wind — especially when there are graves right outside the door — or even below the dome itself.
Until well into the 1900s, it wasn’t uncommon for astronomers to be buried at their observatories. In part, that’s because many of the observatories were privately built and owned. So one of America’s first astronomers, David Rittenhouse, was buried beneath the observatory he built in Pennsylvania.
That observatory has long since vanished. But several that are still around feature the graves of early astronomers or patrons. Percival Lowell, for example, is buried on the grounds of the observatory he founded in Flagstaff, Arizona. A crypt beneath Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh holds the ashes of some of its early astronomers and their family