[2][3] Lick, originally a carpenter and piano maker, had arrived from Peru in San Francisco, California, in late 1847; after accruing significant wealth he began making various donations in 1873.

[5] Lick additionally negotiated that Santa Clara County construct a "first-class road" to the summit, completed in 1876.

The location provided excellent viewing performance because of lack of ambient light and pollution; additionally, the night air at the top of Mt.

Often a layer of low coastal clouds invades the valley below, especially on nights from late-spring to mid-summer, a phenomenon known in California as the June Gloom.

[2] In 1905 (Jan. 5 and Feb. 27), Charles Dillon Perrine discovered the sixth and seventh moons of Jupiter (Elara and Himalia) on photographs taken with the 36-inch Crossley reflecting telescope which he had recently rebuilt.

[10][11] On August 7, 1921, an unusually bright mysterious astronomical object was seen from the observatory only about three degrees from the Sun,[12] where recent analysis in 2016 concluded that this is highly likely a comet.

[14] On May 21, 1939, during a nighttime fog that engulfed the summit, a U.S. Army Air Force Northrop A-17 two-seater attack plane crashed into the main building.

The press widely covered the accident and many reports emphasized the luck in not losing a large cabinet of spectrograms which was knocked over by the crash coming through an astronomer's office window.

The observatory additionally has a 24-inch (61-centimeter) Cassegrain reflector dedicated to photoelectric measurements of star brightness, and received a pair of 20-inch (51-centimeter) astrographs from the Carnegie Corporation.

In the 1970s, a site in the Santa Lucia Mountains at Junípero Serra Peak, southeast of Monterey, was evaluated for possible relocation of many of the telescopes.

[citation needed] However, funding for the move was not available, and in 1980 San Jose began a program to reduce the effects of lighting, most notably replacing all streetlamps with low pressure sodium lamps.

The International Astronomical Union named Asteroid 6216 San Jose to honor the city's efforts toward reducing light pollution.

[20] In 2006, there were 23 families in residence, plus typically between two and ten visiting astronomers from the University of California campuses, who stay in dormitories while working at the observatory.

Current topics of research carried out at Lick include exoplanets, supernovae, active galactic nuclei, planetary science, and development of new adaptive optics technologies.