The Hale Telescope dome is the central feature on the Palomar Observatory compound, and a grand expression of architecture and engineering in its own right. Any development as large as the Hale dome has many contributors, and a team of nearly 100 workers were active for three years (1936-1938) realizing the Hale dome vision. Key contributions were made by Russell Porter who served as observatory principal architect, dome lead engineer Mark Serrurier, the dome steel structure contractor Consolida

About the Palomar/Hale 200-inch mirror and its recoating process. Video for Palomar Observatory and its bilingual virtual tour: https://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/visitor/media/palomartour/ | Palomar Observatory

Tomorrow April 10 marks the 85th anniversary of the Hale Telescope 200-inch mirror blank arriving to Caltech from Corning NY, where it was cast. The largest (future) telescope mirror in the world had traveled for 16 days, 3400 miles across the United States by rail. It was a journey that captured the public’s imagination—thousands would stand along the route to watch the “Big Eye” go by. The Pyrex 200-inch disk arrived safely at Caltech on April 10, 1936. To celebrate the anniversary of this Pal

Palomar Observatory’s 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope is one of the most productive survey telescopes ever built with a dozen completed surveys since the 1950s. The wide-field imaging capabilities of this telescope (it has a usable field hundreds of times larger than that of the 200-inch Hale Telescope) makes it ideal for conducting systematic surveys of the sky. In recent years, the Samuel Oschin Telescope has been used to scan large regions of the sky to search for transient events—objects tha

The Hale Telescope is used every night for astronomical research thanks to a modern and evolving instrument suite. Hale Telescope instruments provide a wide range of imaging and spectroscopic capabilities in the optical and near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/telescopes/hale.html#instruments | Palomar Observatory

The Hale Telescope is used every night for astronomical research thanks to a modern and evolving instrument suite. Some of the Hale instrumentation uses adaptive optics capabilities that correct for distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere—known as seeing, what makes stars twinkle—to deliver sharp images comparable to those produced by space telescopes from a ground-based facility. PALM-3000 is the facility adaptive optics system for the Hale Telescope. The heart of the system is a deformable mi