As over 150 wildfires sweep across the Australian state of New South Wales, the largest of them presses terrifyingly close to the country's biggest optical space observatory.<br/> <br />The fire, with a perimeter of 60 miles, has already destroyed 28 homes and around 100,000 acres of bushland.<br/> <br />It forced the evacuation of the Siding Springs Observatory and damaged five buildings, but spared several giant telescopes used to search for new stars and planets.<br/> <br />Siding Springs is home to the 13-foot Anglo-Australian Telescope, which has surveyed 200,000 galaxies and was instrumental in confirming the existence of dark energy.<br/> <br />The observatory has also helped find more than 30 new planets over the past decade.<br/> <br />Only one person, an elderly firefighter working alone in Tasmania, has died in the fires.
