Palomar History Photo of the Week - January 18, 2010

Last August I posted some photos of the old Sky Chair that was used by astronomers observing from the Hale Telescope's Cassegrain focus from the time prior to the 1965 installation of the Cassegrain Cage.

This week's Palomar History Photo of the Week is the Sky Chair with presumably the crew that built it.


The photo came from a collection of pictures and items that once belonged to James "Jimmy" Fassaro. Fassero wrote the text for the book Photographic Giants of Palomar a collection of Russell W. Porter's Palomar illustrations.

I don't know too much about him, but seems that Fassero had talents other than writing. He did co-author paper with H.W. Babcock and Bruce Rule in 1956 "An Improved Automatic Guider" where they describe an improved photoelectric guider that they put into place for the 200-inch telescope's coude spectrograph.