More TV Premiers of The Journey to Palomar

The Journey to Palomar, the TV-documentary on the career of George Ellery Hale and the telescopes he built, is still having premiers in various PBS markets.

Look for it on KQED in San Francisco Wednesday, Dec. 17th at 10PM on regular and HD and also on KQED World on Dec. 19.

Viewers in Dallas can check it out on KERA next Monday, the 22nd at 9PM and in our nation's capital (Washington DC) it will premier it on WETA on Sunday, December 28 at 3:30 PM.

Mosaic Sees First Light!

As reported earlier in the week Palomar's 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope is getting a new camera known as Mosaic. I am happy to report that it was successfully installed yesterday and last night it achieved first light just ahead of an oncoming winter storm. Commissioning for the instrument will continue for the next several weeks and it will likely be mid to late January before we have any pretty pictures to show from the instrument.

In the meantime here are some shots from the recent activity in the dome.

The 96-megapixel Mosaic camera
Mosaic hooked up to its vacuum pump and control electronics as the crew prepares it for a floor test prior to installing it into the telescope.


Caltech's Gustavo Rahmer working inside the Samuel Oschin Telescope. Note that the camera is held in place by the four vanes of the "spider". The optics of the camera are pointed toward the primary mirror and can be seen in reflection just above Gustavo.

David Hale examines the connections in the telescope's interior as Gustavo looks on.

Congratulations to the entire crew. Palomar Transient Factory should produce some very exciting results in the coming years. Stay tuned.

Happy Birthday to the Mt. Wilson 60-inch Telescope!

Happy Birthday to the Mt. Wilson 60-inch Telescope! Today is its 100th anniversary of first light.

Ready

It is almost time for a new sky survey to begin at Palomar Observatory. The wide-field Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope is ready to receive its new camera - Mosaic.

Mosaic is due to arrive at Palomar this afternoon. The camera is an array of 12 8-megapixel CCD chips. Each image from this 96-megapixel camera will cover 7 square degrees of sky. It will survey the sky for the new Palomar Transient Factory, an automated program to detect and rapidly (in the same night) classify transient sources in the sky. Follow-up observations will be performed with the Palomar 60-inch telescope and other telescopes located elsewhere.

The survey should detect supernovae, variables, quasars, exoplanets and much more.

This fall the observatory staff has been performing maintance on the telescope and its optics. You may have already seen a shot of the newly re-aluminized primary mirror. The telescope's 48-inch corrector plate was also cleaned.

Here is how it looked back in September:

And how it looks today:

There have been so many shots of dirty and clean optics on the Palomar Skies blog this year, that most readers may think that we do this all the time. Actually most of the telescope mirrors only get re-aluminized once every couple of years or so. This year they were all due to get some care, making this a record year for the staff to clean and re-coat optics. In addition to a 40-inch mirror for Mount Laguna Observatory the staff re-coated the 60-inch, 72-inch and 200-inch mirrors and cleaned the corrector for the Samuel Oschin Telescope. That's a lot of glass to care for.

Expect to see some shots of the installation of Mosaic as that work progresses.

Pointing the Way

Last weekend observatory docent Richard Garcia and I had the chance to give David Ho, of Hotech Corporation, a tour of the Hale Telescope.

That's David & I below.

The tour was our way of thanking David for one of the cool items that his company produces - the Astro Aimer. In the photo above David and I are each holding an Astro Aimer. He is doing so to show off his product, I am doing so because the tool I use for public outreach. It combines a red and a white LED flashlight with a 5mW green laser all in one package. I pretty much can't live without one of these tools when it comes to giving tours of the Hale Telescope or hanging out at a star party.

Thanks go out to Richard Garcia for being a super docent at Palomar and taking the photo.

Operation SkyPhoto

Speaking of the Palomar Sky Survey . . . prints from the first survey are being used for a noble cause. Operation SkyPhoto is selling prints to help pay the huge costs associated with treating Alexander Thatte. Alexander is the son of two members of the Physics department of the University of Oxford. He has been battling leukemia for 4 years with chemotherapy and two bone-marrow transplants.The prints themselves are fantastic and make wonderful holiday gifts for anyone with an interest in astronomy. Here is your chance to help someone in need and get a cool thing in return. It doesn't get any better than that.

Hubble Holidays

The folks that run HubbleSite have put up some holiday cards of astronomical images.

One of them just happens to be a shot of the Pleiades captured with the Palomar Samuel Oschin Telescope for the Second Palomar Sky Survey.

Pouring Glass: the Movie

Here is some of the film footage shot from the pouring of the first 200-inch disc on March 25, 1934. Film was shot on the pouring of the second disc (December 2, 1934) but I haven't seen any of that yet.

If anyone knows where I can see footage from the second casting please let me know.

December 2, 1934

I am a few days late in marking the seventy fourth anniversary of the casting of the 200-inch mirror, but I finally have a moment to do so.

Back in March, on the anniversary of the casting of the first 200-inch disc, I described some of the process of making the mirror. The first casting was unsuccessful and the team at Corning Glass Works, led by Dr. George McCauley, got to work in re-engineering the mirror's honeycombed underside. Finally, nearly nine months later they were ready to try again.

The date of the pouring of the mirror, December 2, 1934, also happens to have been my mother's 5th birthday. So here's a happy belated birthday to both the 200-inch mirror and my mom.

Lots of people worked in a variety of capacities on the task of casting the mirror. Tinsmiths, carpenters and more. Those that handled the molten glass, the ladlers, faced intense working conditions. Their task was to scoop out 750 pounds of molten glass and deliver it to the mold. The glass was hot enough to melt steel so part of the crew had to hose down the outside of the ladle. It was a monumental job. These were the men who accomplished the task:

Vincent Capo, Harry Contento, Frank Crisci, Joe Miller, Nick Miller, Frank Oriella, Joe Ruocco, George Scott, Oran Smith, Pasquale Yorio, Rosario Yorio. This was back in the heart of the Great Depression. The highest paid of the ladelers made just 48 cents an hour, earning them $3.84 for their day.

Corning's staff photographer, Ayres A. Stevens, captured many moments in the entire process of making the mirror. This photo is one of my favorites.

Later on, when I have more bandwidth (possibly Saturday), I'll post a short film clip of the team in action.

Not quite yet . . . .

Today is seventy fourth anniversary of the pouring of the glass for the 200-inch mirror, I am not able to make an appropriate post today so I will put it off until sometime tomorrow. In the meantime have a look at this June 1934 article from Modern Mechanix describing the pouring of the first disc which was unsuccessful.