Happy Hale Day!

For those of you keeping score at home, George Ellery Hale was born 143 years ago today.


Hale can been seen in the photo above (on the right) talking with his arms linked with an enraptured Andrew Carnegie. It is one of my favorite photos of Hale because you can see him in action. Hale was a wildly successful dreamer and schemer who numerous times was able to talk the rich and famous out of money to advance knowledge. He did this not only for astronomy, but in many other areas as well.

Make No Small Plans
Dream No Small Dreams

If you missed the recent re-broadcast of The Journey to Palomar on PBS, you can catch it on Hulu and learn more about this amazing man.

Reminder: The Journey to Palomar on PBS

Consider yourself reminded that The Journey to Palomar airs on many PBS stations tonight (June 22nd). Be sure to check your local listings and check out the trailer below:

The trailer was made for the first airing of the documentary, which is why it says "November 10th" at the end. Feel free to ignore that.

The Journey to Palomar Returns to PBS this Week

I am happy to report that The Journey to Palomar, a documentary about George Ellery Hale and the building of the 200-inch telescope, will again be shown on PBS. It is a moving and inspirational story that is not to be missed.

Follow this link to check your local listings.

A short clip is posted below.

Watch the full episode. See more The Journey to Palomar.

142 Years Ago Today

George Ellery Hale was born 142 years ago today. Why not celebrate by watching The Journey to Palomar?

Thanks to Palomar Observatory docent Roger for bringing in the cake!

Palomar History Photo of the Week - May 10, 2010

Sixty two years ago today it was announced that the 200-inch telescope atop Palomar Mountain would be named the Hale Telescope.

In honor of that, our History Photo of the Week is made up of photos of the visitor's entrance to the dome of the Hale Telescope. The foyer has this tribute to George Ellery Hale:





What else is there to say?

The Scoop on Palomar

In 1954 the trading card company Topps issued a series of cards called Scoops. The series featured 156 cards with artwork on the front and on the back was a newspaper headline from an event in history. The events covered a very wide range of topics such as Magellan's round the world trip, the Chicago Fire, the destruction of Pompeii, Lewis and Clark, and various events from World War II. There were numerous science events in the mix such as the bouncing of a radar beam off of the Moon and the dedication of the world's largest telescope.


Like a lot of things from this era that were aimed at kids, the fact checking wasn't the best.


Click on the image to embiggen and you'll see that they made the common mistake of referring to "Mt. Palomar" when the name is actually Palomar Mountain, but then again almost nobody gets that right even today. Their big mistake was saying that the telescope was named after Dr. Emery Hale. That is at least sort of close to George Ellery Hale.

This card was the last in the series and took me a while to tack one down that was both in good condition and at a decent price.

A Visit to the Hale Solar Laboratory

Last Saturday I had the rare opportunity to visit the Hale Solar Laboratory. George Ellery Hale had the building built in 1924 to serve as his personal office and solar research lab after his retirement as the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory.

I took over 200 photos from my visit - far too many to share here, but I have included a few below.

The building is now privately owned, but it is a treasure. As you can see it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989.

Here is a diagram of the solar telescope contained within:


For our visit the solar telescope was brought back into action. Here is the view from within the dome:

The whole building is a 150-foot focal length folded telescope. Light from the Sun is collected by a coelostat mirror and reflected up to a second flat mirror which directs the light back down to a third mirror, back up to a "secondary" mirror and back down to the observing station seen below.
For spectrographic work the light is further directed down in the a deep pit and through a diffraction grating. Here's a look taken from partway in the pit looking upward.

The observing station and Hale's library (below) may look familiar to you if you have seen the documentary about Hale, The Journey to Palomar.

Much of Hale's writings about astronomy in the mid to late 1920s and his planning for the 200-inch telescope took place here in this room. I feel fortunate to finally have had the chance to visit Hale's Fortress of Solitude.

George Ellery Hale: the Building

George Ellery Hale was many things. To name just a few he was an astronomer, a telescope builder, and a civic planner. He took such an active role in civic planning that the Pasadena Permit Center is named for him.

From the Permit Center's website:

A History of our Building's Namesake, George Ellery Hale

Appropriately, the namesake for the Permit Center Building is George Ellery Hale. Hale was a renaissance man, personifying the merging of disciplines into an integrated whole. Although best known as a scientist and astronomer who established the Mt. Wilson observatory and inspired the founding of Caltech, Hale was also a pioneer in city planning and was a major contributor to the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in its formative years.

As a member of Pasadena's first Planning Commission, Hale guided the master plan for the city's Civic Center. He promoted a grand plan, suggesting that an attractive city would be a prosperous one. The impressive City Hall was completed in 1927 and two years later the elegant building which now houses the Permit Center was built for the Southern California Gas Company. Acquired by the city and renamed in 1986, it now bears the name of George Ellery Hale, the visionary civic leader who championed the Civic Center.

Technology. City planning. The integration of disciplines. These attributes of George Ellery Hale are pillars of Pasadena's Permit Center.

In 1994 the city restored the historic 1929 lobby of the George Ellery Hale building to form the environment for the Permit Center service counter. The two-story space features the original decorative ceiling, unusual historic painted plaster walls (hidden for years by wood paneling) and the original tile flooring. The building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Civic Center district.

On one of my Pasadena trips earlier this year I had to stop and visit the building just to pay homage. Here is a shot of the building from across the street:


From closer you can see Hale's name outside:


A close up of the name:


Once I was there I had to go in. Wearing my Palomar Observatory shirt I explained to the confused (but nice) person behind the counter that I worked at an observatory where we had a big telescope named for George Ellery Hale and that he helped to create it. I then asked if there was any artwork or plaque in the building the commemorated Hale.

Reluctantly the kind receptionist took me in to a back area where this sketch is hanging on the wall:



I grabbed a quick photo, said my thanks and left. According to the Caltech Archives, the original sketch was done in charcoal by S. Seymour Thomas in December, 1929. I didn't stay long enough to see if this was a copy or not. The sketch was likely a study done prior to the painting of Hale that Seymour did which stately hangs in the Carnegie library on Santa Barbra Street in Pasadena.

George Ellery Hale: the Podcast

My latest podcast for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcasts is now available via iTunes and here on the 365 Days of Astronomy site too.

You can read George Ellery Hale's 1922 book, The New Heavens, here from Project Gutenberg or here from Google Book Search.

I have also posted a copy of Hale's April 1928 article in Harper's Monthly: The Possibilities of Large Telescopes.

Busted

Back in mid March Pasadena Daily Photo posted a photo of the bust of George Ellery Hale which resided for years in the library inside the Henry M. Robinson Laboratory of Astrophysics. Now that Caltech Astronomy has moved into the Cahill Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics George Ellery Hale has moved as well.

Here he is inside the new astronomy library.


I know of three other busts of Hale. One outside on the Caltech campus, one at Mount Wilson and one at Palomar. I'll put photos of the rest of them here on the blog sometime in the near future.

Visualizing the Future of Big Telescopes

You may remember Todd Mason from The Journey to Palomar. He and his wife Robin were the filmmakers who brought the career of George Ellery Hale to life in their fine documentary. If you saw the film you also saw some the 3-D graphics that Todd produced of the Hale Telescope.

While making the documentary Todd was also producing graphics for some of the big new telescopes that are now on the horizon. His new site Todd Mason Graphics has wonderful renderings of some future telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and (our local favorite) the Thirty Meter Telescope.

Here is one of his of renderings of TMT:


There are plenty more on his new website. It is well worth the look if you are interested in any of these new telescopes.

If you have The Journey to Palomar DVD, you can see his work in the special features that describe some of these giant new telescopes.

Eyes on the Skies

In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy the European Southern Observatory has produced a movie and book known as Eyes on the Skies. Follow the link and you can watch the whole thing in HD.

It explores the many facets of the telescope — the historical development, the scientific importance, the technological breakthroughs, and also the people behind this ground-breaking invention, their triumphs and failures. It is presented by Dr. J, aka Dr. Joe Liske, a professional astronomer from the European Southern Observatory and host of the Hubblecast video podcast. The DVD runs for 60 minutes and contains subtitles in several languages.

The second episode, Bigger is Better, is embedded below. It follows some of the story of George Ellery Hale, the development of Yerkes Observatory (note to narrator: Yerkes is pronounced "yer keys") Mt. Wilson and Palomar.

The show is freely available for TV broadcasters and for public events carried out by educators, science centers, planetariums, amateur astronomers etc.

Update: I had posted a link to the video via YouTube, but it is no longer available. In addition to the link above, you can also, find the video here on Hulu.

Here's to You Mr. Robinson

A while back I posted about the new Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Astronomers and staff are now occupying the new building. Of course that means that the old building, the Robinson Astrophysics Lab, is being vacated. I visited on Wednesday looking for interesting relics that may eventually go on display here at Palomar.

I didn't manage to get any photos, but thankfully there are some over at the Pasadena Daily Photo blog. If you are reading this around on or around March 20 you'll see the posts. Anyone finding this later should specifically check the posts for March 18, March 19 (with a great photo of a bust of George Ellery Hale), and March 20. In reading the comments of one of the posts I found that the Pasadena Permit Center is named for none other than G. E. Hale. I had no idea.

The Robinson Astrophysics Lab was named for Henry Robinson, who was an L.A. businessman and a member of the Caltech board of trustees. Robinson provided an endowment for the operation of the Palomar Observatory and even negotiated the deals to make the initial land purchases for the observatory.

The building will have its interior remodeled and will be occupied by Caltech Geology become the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science where people will "address the complex issue of global climate change from a wide range of disciplines".

News & Events

Lots of things going on these days.

The November issue of Sky & Telescope magazine just hit my mailbox. Of possible interest to the readers of Palomar Skies is the article on Hale, Ritchey and Mt. Wilson's 60-inch telescope (which turns 100 years old this year). Also, at the end of the magazine you'll notice that there will be an article on The Journey to Palomar in next month's issue.

Speaking of The Journey to Palomar, they will be having a NASA webcast for students & teachers on Wednesday, October 8. During the webcast they will show off some of the achievements of Hale, the next generation of giant telescopes & a new mission to the Moon.

Friday, October 3rd @ 6 pm I'll be giving a visual tour of the universe at the Starry Nights Festival hosted by the Hi-Desert Nature Museum in Yucca Valley, CA.

On October 17th @ 8:30 pm I'll be giving a talk on the history of Palomar Observatory at the Bianchi Planetarium at Cal State Northridge.

UPDATE: (if this works) Here's a radio spot for the Starry Nights Festival.

Happy Birthday Dr. Hale

George Ellery Hale was born on 140 years ago today. We should all try to live by his motto:

Make no small plans. Dream no small dreams.

In the Shadow of a Giant

George Ellery Hale died 70 years ago today. From Ronald Florence's The Perfect Machine:

A few days prior to his death he felt well enough to be wheeled outside. He looked up at the sky and said, "It is a beautiful day. The sun is shining and they are working on Palomar."

While Hale missed seeing the completion of the mighty 200-inch telescope, his vision and determination made the telescope a reality. That's why it has carried his name since 1948.


Hale's shadow looms large even 70 years later. Modern-day astronomers are poised to begin a new project that would have made him proud, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

The TMT will have almost 36 times the light-gathering power of the Hale Telescope and will push astronomy into a new era of giant telescopes. Design work and site selection are still underway, but big things are coming. As Hale said:

Make no small plans. Dream no small dreams.

There's nothing small about the TMT. Stay tuned.