Palomar Observatory
Palomar Observatory is a privately-owned observatory located in San Diego County, California, 90 miles 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 Hale Telescope, the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope, the 18-inch Schmidt telescope, and a 60-inch reflecting telescope.
 
| |
| Organization | Caltech |
|---|---|
| Location | San Diego County, California, USA |
| Coordinates | 33ÃÂð 21' 21 N 116ÃÂð 51' 50 W |
| Altitude | 1713 m (5618 ft) |
| Weather | (# of clear nights, humidity) |
| Webpage | http://www.astro.caltech.edu/observatories/palomar/ |
| Telescopes | |
| Hale Telescope | 200 inch Reflector |
| 60-inch Telescope | 60-inch Reflector |
| Oschin Telescope | 48-inch Schmidt Reflector |
| JPL Palomar Testbed Interferometer | Interferometer |
| Snoop | All-Sky Camera |
This 200-inch telescope is named after astronomer George Ellery Hale. It was built by a Caltech-Carnegie consortium using a Pyrex blank manufactured by Corning Glass Works. The telescope (the largest in the world at that time) saw 'first light' in 1949.
The Hale Telescope is operated by a consortium of Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Cornell University. [1]
For a history of the 200 inch instrument's construction find a copy of The Perfect Machine by Ronald Florence, ISBN 0-06-018205-9.
The Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS), sponsored by the National Geographic institute, was completed in 1954 (actual date referenced varies, ranging from 1950 to 1957). This survey was performed using (14 inch)² or (6 degree)² photographic plates in both blue and red (separately) on the 48-inch Schmidt reflecting telescope. The survey covered the sky from a declination of +90 degrees (celestial north pole) to -24 degrees (plate centers) and all right ascensions and had a sensitivity to +22 magnitudes.
Until the completion of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), POSS was the most extensive all-sky survey ever. When completed, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey will surpass both. POSS also exists in digitized form (i.e., the photographic plates were scanned), as the Digital Sky Survey (DSS) [1].
One of the current ongoing research programs at Palomar is the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program.
This program makes use of the Palomar QUEST Variability survey [1] 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 Oschin Schmidt Telescope at Palomar in summer of 2003 and the results are used by several projects, including the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking mentioned above. Another program that uses the QUEST results discovered Sedna (astronomical object) on 14 November 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's 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 CCDs covering the whole (4 degree by 4 degree) field of view of the Schmidt telescope, the largest CCD mosaics used in an astronomical camera at the time.The Hale Telescope
Palomar Observatory Sky Survey
Current research