Mount Palomar

Just returned from a trip to Southern California’s Mount Palomar Observatory. While immersing myself in astronomy books as a child, I often marveled at the groundbreaking images taken with this telescope. And it carried my imagination away to other worlds and galaxies far away. Visiting the historic observatory had been a childhood dream of mine, and I was very excited to finally get there in person.

Completed in 1948, the big 200-inch reflector was the world’s largest telescope for many decades. Together with the Mount Wilson Observatory, it is the place where modern cosmology was born. Measurements obtained from these two observatories led to the discovery of foreign galaxies, the expanding universe, the composition of the universe, the birth and death of stars and the formation of planets.

Today, Mount Palomar’s Hale telescope wouldn’t even make the top-ten list among the world’s largest telescopes. Here’s a list:

http://astro.nineplanets.org/bigeyes.html