The Bobcat Fire was within 500 feet of the observatory, which was founded in 1904 and once had some of the largest operational telescopes in the world, the U.S. Forest Service said.
Images tweeted by the service Tuesday showed a massive plume of smoke rising from the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, where the observatory is on a roughly 5,700-foot peak.
The service said a C-130 aircraft was dropping thousands of gallons of retardant Tuesday afternoon to halt the fire's spread. An imageshowed a line of wildland firefighters crossing a suspension bridge from the century-old 100-inch Hooker telescope.
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