The university in March announced that it would donate the observatory and about 50 acres to the nonprofit foundation. As a portal to the universe for such scientists as George Ellery Hale, Robert Burnham, Edwin Hubble, Gerard Kuiper, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein, the Yerkes Observatory would become known as the … A: YFF's task of recreating Yerkes Observatory is a challenging one to navigate, and must be handled one step at a time. But the private university also wanted to sell prime lakefront acreage for private residential development — offering to use some proceeds to jump-start the Yerkes Future Foundation with financial contributions that, so far, have been undisclosed. Mathews, who is legally blind, got started at Yerkes by helping out with the observatory’s early work to make astronomy accessible for blind students. Members of the Yerkes Future Foundation find shade under a large maple tree on a portion of the 48-acre John Olmsted-designed grounds of the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay. No buyer came forward, so they shut the doors to the public on October 1, 2018. In order to save the observatory, a group of approximately 45 concerned individuals formed the Yerkes Future Foundation. Mathews is a third-year at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater and a founder of Save Yerkes, a student-run group formed earlier this year to keep the observatory open. In April 2018 the University of Chicago, owners of the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, announced that they had no practical use for such an observatory. The 60,000-square-foot facility, home to three domes each with its own … Unless a buyer came forward, they would close the observatory. GLAS' network of local and global scientists and educators is an invaluable tool, sharing many goals with the revived Yerkes, but the exact future … The Yerkes Observatory was founded in 1897 by transit magnate, Charles Tyson Yerkes, to house the largest refracting telescope in the world, the Yerkes Telescope.