Mount Palomar Observatory

Palomar Observatory is a privately owned observatory located in San Diego County, California, 90 miles (145 km) southeast of Mount Wilson Observatory, on Palomar Mountain. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The observatory currently consists of four main instruments: the 200 inch (5.08 m) Hale Telescope, the 48 inch (1.22 m) Samuel Oschin Telescope, the 18 inch (457 mm) Schmidt telescope, and a 60 inch (1.52 m) reflecting telescope. In addition, the Palomar Testbed Interferometer is located at this observatory.

The Hale Telescope

This 200 inch (5.08 m) telescope is named after astronomer George Ellery Hale. It was built by Caltech with a 6 million dollar grant from the Rockefeller Institute, using a Pyrex blank manufactured by Corning Glass Works. The telescope (the largest in the world at that time) saw 'first light' in 1948. The American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble was the first astronomer to use the telescope for observing.

The Hale Telescope is operated by a consortium of Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Cornell University. [1]

For a history of the 200-inch (5.08 m) instrument's construction find a copy of The Perfect Machine by Ronald Florence, ISBN 0-06-018205-9.

Although the Hale Telescope has been used to discover hundreds of asteroids, it should be mentioned that its tenth-scale engineering model still resides in Corning, New York, home of the Corning Glass Works, and was used to discover at least one minor planet, (34419) Corning †.

Other telescopes and instruments

• A 60" (1.5m) f/8.75 telescope. It was dedicated in 1970 to take some of the load off of the Hale Telescope. This telescope discovered the first brown dwarf star.
• The 48" (1.22m) Samuel Oschin Schmidt Camera. The dwarf planet Eris was discovered with this instrument.
• A 24" telescope completed in January 2006.
• An 18" (0.4m) Schmidt camera. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered with this instrument.
• The Palomar Planet Search Telescope, a small robotic telescope dedicated to the search for planets around other stars.
• The Palomar Testbed Interferometer which allows for very high resolution measurements.

Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

The Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS), sponsored by the National Geographic institute, was completed in 1958 (The first plates were shot in November 1948 and the last in April 1958). This survey was performed using 14 inch² or (6 degree)² blue-sensitive (Kodak 103a-O) and red-sensitive (Kodak 103a-E) photographic plates on the 48 inch (1.22 m) Samuel Oschin Schmidt reflecting telescope. The survey covered the sky from a declination of +90 degrees (celestial north pole) to -27 degrees and all right ascensions and had a sensitivity to +22 magnitudes (about 1 million times fainter than the limit of human vision). A southern extension extending the sky coverage of the POSS to -33 degrees declination was shot in 1957 - 1958. The final POSS consisted of 937 plate pairs.

J.B. Whiteoak, an Australian radio astronomer, used the same instrument to extend this survey further south to about -45 degrees declination, using the same field centers as the corresponding northern declination zones. Unlike the POSS, the Whiteoak extension consisted only of red-sensitive (Kodak 103a-E) photographic plates.

Until the completion of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), POSS was the most extensive wide-field sky survey ever. When completed, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey will surpass the POSS in depth, although the POSS covers almost 2.5 times as much area on the sky. POSS also exists in digitized form (i.e., the photographic plates were scanned), both in photographic form as the Digital Sky Survey (DSS) [2] and in catalog form as the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner (MAPS) Catalog [3].

Current research

One of the current ongoing research programs at Palomar is the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program.

This program makes use of the Palomar Quasar Equatorial Survey Team (QUEST) Variability survey [4] that began in the autumn of 2001 to map a band of sky around the equator. This search switched to a new camera installed on the 48 inch (1.22 m) Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at Palomar in summer of 2003 and the results are used by several projects, including the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking project. Another program that uses the QUEST results discovered 90377 Sedna on November 14, 2003, and around 40 Kuiper belt objects. Other programs that share the camera are Shri Kulkarni's search for gamma-ray bursts (this takes advantage of the automated telescope's ability to react as soon as a burst is seen and take a series of snapshots of the fading burst), Richard Ellis' search for supernovae to test whether the universe's expansion is accelerating or not, and S. George Djorgovski's quasar search.

The camera itself is a mosaic of 112 Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) covering the whole (4 degree by 4 degree) field of view of the Schmidt telescope, the largest CCD mosaic used in an astronomical camera when built.

Directors

• Ira Sprague Bowen, 1948–1964
• Horace Welcome Babcock, 1964–1978
• Maarten Schmidt, 1978–1980
• Gerry Neugebauer, 1980–1994
• James A. Westphal, 1994–1997
• Wallace Leslie William Sargent, 1997–2000
• Richard Salisbury Ellis, 2000–2006
• Shri Kulkarni, 2006–?

Public access

The Palomar Observatory is an active research facility. However, parts of it are open to the public during the day. Visitors can take self-guided tours of 200-inch (5.08 m) telescope daily from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. There is a visitor's center and a gift shop on the grounds.

The observatory is located off State Route 76 in northern San Diego County, California, in 2 hours' drive from downtown San Diego, and 3 hours' drive from central Los Angeles ( UCLA, LAX airport ).

Although the surrounding area is mostly undeveloped, there is a big hotel and casino approximately 15 miles (24 km) from the observatory.

Trivia

The word palomar is from the Spanish language, dating back from the time of Spanish California, and means pigeon house (in the same sense as henhouse). The name may be in reference to the large shoals of pigeons that can be seen during the spring and autumn months atop Palomar Mountain or reminiscent of an old pigeon-raising facility built there by the Spaniards.

Italo Calvino's 1983 novel Mr. Palomar, which features a man reflecting on how he observes the world, is named after the observatory.

Much of the surrounding region of Southern California has adopted shielded lighting to reduce the light pollution that is given off that would potentially affect the observatory. [5]

The band Wellwater Conspiracy's 1997 debut album, Declaration of Conformity, contains a track entitled "Palomar Observatory." It is the last track on the album and completely instrumental. It is likely the track title was chosen by singer/drummer Matt Cameron, who grew up in San Diego near the observatory.

Also, Canadian band The Rheostatics 11th track from their effort Whale Music is entitled Palomar. The song depicts a man named Palomar on the top of a mount, cleaning his lenses with saline waters. Palomar assembles his kaleidoscope in his lonely observatory. The song is an extremely visual characterization of a man on a mountain and his relationship with his best friend, a dog.

Although the observatory is not normally viewed from the interior, in 2002, along with a merit award for first telescope: junior division. A young amateur astronomer, Jakob Getson, was awarded a full guided tour of the observatory from the Riverside Telescope Makers Conference. To date, the only non-professional person to be awarded a full tour.

External links

• Caltech Astronomy
• The SBO Palomar Sky Survey Prints
• Palomar Observatory Weather. Retrieved Dec 2, 2006.
• Palomar Observatory Clear Sky Clock Forecast of observing conditions.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Florence, Ronald (1995 September). The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope. Harper Perennial, 480. ISBN 0-06-092670-8. 
• (1966) in Crawford, David Livingstone: The Construction of large telescopes, International Astronomical Union. Symposium no. 27, London, New York: Academic Press, 234. 
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