Samuel Oschin Telescope in 3D

Here's a 3D view of Palomar's 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope.

SWIFT Installed: the Movie

As promised here is the time-lapse movie of the inaugural installation of the new SWIFT spectrograph. You'll see the adaptive optics (AO) instrument is installed and then some computer racks are installed into the Hale Telescope's Cassegrain cage. SWIFT then comes out onto the observing floor and then it is mated to the AO unit and the telescope.

A 104 mb higher resolution version of this time-lapse movie is available here.

SWIFT Installed

The newest instrument on the Hale Telescope, Oxford's SWIFT Spectrograph, has been installed. Tonight is its first night at Palomar.

The top photo shows SWIFT on its handling cart just before it was mated to the adaptive optics instrument in the Hale Telescope's Cassegrain cage.

In the second photo the instrument has just been installed. The next step is to cable everything up and then check out the system. They have two nights for the commissioning and a couple of science nights afterward.

I took many photos of the instrument being installed. Expect a movie soon.

Sky Above. Clouds Below.

Here's the view from Palomar Mountain this morning, just before sunrise. Low clouds have blown in from the coast as they often do. This produces beautiful views as one looks down on the clouds and has the added benefit of also masking the city lights.

Goodbye to QUEST

Tuesday, September 30 was the last night for the QUEST camera on the Palomar 48-inch (1.2 meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope. The 161-megapixel camera was installed in the spring of 2003 and saw a successful career here at Palomar.

The camera took images that covered four degrees on a side and was used to hunt for a variety of objects including near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper Belt Objects, supernovae, quasars and more as a part of the Palomar-Quest Survey.

On the public outreach front, the camera was used to produce the images for The Big Picture, now on display at Griffith Observatory.

The big headlines came as new discoveries of large worlds were made in the Kuiper Belt. Caltech's Mike Brown offers some comments on the end of his survey on his blog.

Earlier this week QUEST, its computers and some other gear was loaded up into a moving van. The camera is headed for the 1-meter Schmidt Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

What's up next for Palomar's Samuel Oschin Telescope. It is time to spruce it up for its next survey, the Palomar Transient Factory. The corrector plate has been pulled so that it can be washed. The 72-inch mirror (Yes, the 48-inch telescope has a 72-inch mirror. Perhaps a future blog post will explain that.) will soon be re-aluminized. In a few weeks the 96-megapixel Mosaic camera will be installed.

More on Mosaic and Palomar Transient Factory later. Stay tuned.

Palomar in Science Fiction - II

"Hurtle toward the far reaches of the universe with the
space vikings of the future!"

How can you pass on a tag line like that? Riders to the Stars (1954) is another science fiction film that features Palomar Observatory.

The basic premise is that there's important material in meteors that gets destroyed when they pass through Earth's atmosphere. So to get it, you've got to go up there and catch 'em. That's where Palomar comes in - tracking the meteors so that the, um, space vikings (which I take to mean explorers) come in.

If you watch the video below, you'll notice that the Palomar footage looks exactly the same as the footage from Rocketship X-M in my first Palomar in Science Fiction post.

Both Rocketship X-M and Riders to the Stars got their footage from The Big Eye Space Telescope, a seven-minute 1948 (newsreel?) documentary film made about the observatory.

For your viewing pleasure I have edited down The Big Eye Space Telescope to show the same clips as seen in Riders above.

Perhaps the use of the same video several times represents the 1950s version of a video going viral.

The Birth of Palomar's 'Giant Eye'

Today Wired.com's This Day in Tech features the Hale Telescope's 200-inch mirror. There are a couple of mistakes in the story (there's no 100-inch telescope on Palomar), but it is still worth your time. While you are there you might also want to read the article future giant telescopes.

New Exhibit opens about Palomar Observatory

The Valley Center History Museum has a new exhibit about Palomar Observatory. Here's what they have to say:

The 60th anniversary of the opening of the Palomar Observatory is being marked by a new exhibit at the Valley Center History Museum.

Museum President Bill Hutchings said the display will not show the typical photos of the finished observatory but, instead will focus on the construction of both the mountain-top site and the road leading to the dome. For the first time, photos will be publicly exhibited showing County prisioners who comprised much of the work crews.

Hutchings said other unusual items in the exhibit are newspaper ads of the late 1940's and 1950's when merchants along Valley Center Road used the phrase "Highway to the Stars" as their official address.

There are also photos of crowds lining the streets on November 18 and 19, 1947, when the Hale Telescope made its way through Valley Center. Streets signs reading "Highway to the Stars" also lined the roadway.

The observatory was dedicated in June of 1948 and opened to the public in January 1949. The museum exhibit will continue through January.

Hours are 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday at 29200 Cole Grade Road. Admission and parking are free. For more information, call (760) 749-2993 or visit valleycenterhistory.org.

I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but I hope to see it soon. Here's a shot of the old Highway to the Stars sign:

Sunset: October 1, 2008

Here is the light source:

and the subject.


It must be something about October, Halloween and the color orange.

Practice Does Make Perfect

Yesterday we finally had the chance to open up the bell jar/aluminizing chamber to have a look at how the practice aluminizing went.



Once the top of the chamber was safely removed and placed on the observing floor the glass plates and slides were examined.

The crew checked the glass for any streaks or imperfections and then measured the reflectivity of the samples which check in as high at 91.75%. All-in-all it was a good test of the system. Everyone was happy with the results and the 200-inch mirror is cleared for its recoating in November.

Big thanks go out to Susan for shooting photos for me yesterday while I was off the mountain giving a talk.