Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:03:56 +0000 (GMT)

[...]
    Many thanks for your message and sympathy!  What appears to be going
to happen, although I cannot even get any hard information on it, and a
meeting with people who were supposed to know, arranged for a month ago,
has been deliberately put off and put off, maybe with the idea that events
will actually overtake it.  But I believe the plan is to demolish all the
additional building to the north of the dome and just leave the bare dome.
How it will be entered, and where the computers and power supplies,
servers and what-have you will be, I don't know.  And of course the new
building will be practically touching the dome and a great deal higher,
and it will have great fluorescent lights, and even if it is provided with
blinds nobody will close them, and then of course it will have a megawatt
or two of heating in it and will make the seeing much worse even than the
existing adjacent buildings do.  They include the new 'institute of
cosmology', which of course cares nothing for astronomy; it has more than
50 windows facing the dome without even any blinds on them at all, so even
if anyone were prepared to close blinds (which nobody is) there would be
nothing to close.  It seems extraordinary to me that so-called astronomy
students (and staff) seem not to have the slightest care for astronomy.
This is a very different place from the one to which I came as a graduate
student in 1957, when the people here were concerned with observing and
the place was dark.  There were no street lights near, and few buildings;
on a winter evening I could see not only the obvious Milky Way but even
the Zodiacal Light when I looked out of the dome.  Redman advised me when
I first arrived that the way he found his way down Madingley Road to go to
dinner in College on a foggy evening was - he cycled down the cats'-eyes!
Not only is there no reason to have cats'-eyes on a floodlit road now, but
you would not live ten seconds if you cycled down the middle of the road,
fog or no fog!  And now, looking out from the dome, one can barely make
out the main outlines of the constellations.
    Best wishes to you, though!
              Roger