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

The 200-inch Hale Telescope

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

The 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope