Palomar Observatory

Mount Palomar

Palomar Observatory, astronomical observatory located on Mount Palomar, about 40 miles (65 km) north-northeast of San Diego, Calif. The observatory is the site of the famous Hale Telescope, a reflector with a 200-inch (508-cm) aperture that has proved instrumental in cosmological research. The telescope—which made its first observations in 1949 and was named in honour of the American astronomer George Ellery Hale—was the largest instrument of its kind until 1976.

In 1928 the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Education Board awarded a $6 million grant to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the construction of a 200-inch telescope to complement and extend the capabilities of Hale’s Mount Wilson Observatory. In 1934, after several years of searching, the 6,126-foot- (1,867-metre-) high Mount Palomar was selected as the site for the new instrument. In the next year the Corning Glass Works succeeded in the difficult task of producing a fully acceptable 200-inch Pyrex mirror blank. The 20-ton blank was shipped by rail to Caltech for grinding and polishing.

Construction of the 1,000-ton rotating dome, the split-ring equatorial mounting, and a complex mirror-support system began in 1936 and was managed by a team of Caltech and Mount Wilson astronomers, physicists, and engineers. Some of the nation’s largest manufacturing firms, such as the Westinghouse Electric Company, were also involved. World War II delayed the telescope’s completion until 1948. It had four times the light-collecting power of the next-largest telescope, the 100-inch (254-cm) reflector at Mount Wilson.

To take full advantage of a telescope of this unprecedented size, Caltech built two powerful Schmidt cameras, one 48 inches (122 cm) and the other 18 inches (46 cm), that surveyed the sky deeper than it had ever been before. The larger Schmidt camera produced the National Geographic Society–Palomar Observatory Sky Survey in the 1950s, which was a collection of 935 pairs of 14-inch (36-cm) square glass photographic plates that recorded, down to the 20th magnitude, all objects that were visible from Mount Palomar.

The 200-inch telescope operates in three optical configurations: at prime focus for wide-field deep-sky operations and for spectroscopy of the faintest and most distant galaxies; at an intermediate Cassegrain focus for detailed study of brighter objects; and at a subterranean Coudé focus for high-dispersion spectroscopy. By 1950 an extremely fast prime-focus spectrograph with solid Schmidt optics had become available; for decades this instrument made the Palomar telescope the most powerful for probing the dynamics of the universe. The 200-inch telescope was the first in the world to have an observing cage for the astronomer inside the telescope tube at prime focus; in the 1960s observations made from this cage determined that quasars were the most distant objects in the universe.

The observatory has been constantly upgraded with new technologies, mainly high-speed computers, servo-feedback systems, position sensors, and electronic detectors, such as charge-coupled devices (CCDs), that vastly improved both the efficiency and the sensitivity of the instrument.

From its inception the Palomar Observatory was administered jointly with Mount Wilson Observatory as the Hale Observatories by a consortium created by Caltech and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Since 1980, Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory have been separate entities. Mount Palomar also contains 60-inch (152-cm) and 24-inch (61-cm) reflectors and an experimental interferometer.