Ed's Life-Long Dream Fulfilled

Many readers won't know that while I was in grades 7+8, my desire was be an astronomer some day. Yep. I even sent off to Caltech for a brochure "Careers in Astronomy." I even had my own telescope --a laminated cardboard tube w/ lenses on each end, bolted to a stepladder-- and froze during the winter months out in our backyard looking at the sky.

Well, my folks were great about encouraging me with lots of books on the subject. I especially was fascinated about the largest optical telescope in the world (at the time): The Hale 200-in Reflector Telescope at Mt. Palomar in California ...a long ways away from Fostoria, Ohio!

Well, it turns out that Mt Palomar was only 40 mi away from where we were staying in the Laguna Mountains... so we took a day-trip up there. And ...wow... it was better that all those pictures I used to look at!


To get an idea of the scale, that is Karen standing by the entrance to the Mt Palomar Observatory, home to the Hale Telescope.

...Impressive, eh?

Above on the curved roof, you can see the large shutter doors that open up at night so that the telescope can see out into the sky above. They are so precisely balanced the it only takes a 1/2 hp electric motor to move them!

Inside was the goal: The BIG Telecope itself--

It doesn't look like you might expect, because it is a reflector scope. That means the light is gathered by a curved mirror at the bottom instead on a curved lens at the top. The broader the mirror, the more it can see. The Hale Telescope's mirror is 201-inches in diameter (16-ft, 9-in across)!

It took years for the engineers at Corning Glass and Caltech just to make and polish the 4-ton pyrex mirror.

Size? Well, here is our Tour Group -standing on the floor, to the right of the telecope.

The mirror is at the bottom of the vertical, open-girder tube. The astronomers originally sat in the dark cylinder-tube at the top, and used a large optical camera to expose glass plates. (We heard a true story of one scientist who made an hours-long time-exposure of a very faint star, only to discover that he had forgotten to open the camera shutter!)

Nowadays, they use digital photography: a 94-megapixil camera! ("and you thought your 9 MPcamera was something, eh?")

And the things they see? Well, many things scientists have known for years were discoved with this Hale Telescope, e.g. black holes & quasars.

And here is a astro-photo that I now sign off with ...FYI, It's the "Nebula #NGC6559"