Happy Astronomy Day

Today is Astronomy Day! Lots of places around the country are hold events. In San Diego, the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center will be having a wide-range of events including a live broadcast from Palomar hosted by me.

Here at Palomar we are celebrating by having an engineering run. During the engineering run members of the staff here will make repair and improvements to the telescope's mirror supports, wiring, and dome rails. There's a lot of work going on.

I have been going around taking pictures and yesterday I put together two 3-D shots of the Hale. So if you've got red-blue glasses, put them on and click on the images below.


I'll post more images from the engineering run soon, but don't expect to see them in 3-D.

Oh, for those of you keeping score at home it was on this day 60 years ago that it was announced that the name of the 200-inch telescope would be the Hale Telescope. More on that later.