Palomar Observatory

Palomar Observatory is a privately-owned observatory located in San Diego County, California, 90 miles (145 km) southeast of Mount Wilson Observatory, on Palomar Mountain. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The observatory currently consists of four main instruments: the 200 inch (5.08 m) Hale Telescope, the 48 inch (1.22 m) Samuel Oschin Telescope, the 18 inch (457 mm) Schmidt telescope, and a 60 inch (1.52 m) reflecting telescope. In addition, the Palomar Testbed Interferometer is located at this observatory. The word palomar is from the Spanish language, dating back from the time of Spanish California, and means pigeon house (in the same sense as henhouse). The name may be in reference to the large shoals of pigeons that can be seen during the spring and autumn months atop Palomar Mountain or reminiscent of an old pigeon-raising facility built there by the Spaniards.

**Palomar Observatory**
Telescopes

Organization	Caltech
Location	San Diego County, California, USA
Coordinates
Altitude	1713 m (5618 ft)
Weather	(# of clear nights, humidity)
Webpage	Palomar ar Caltech
Hale Telescope	200 inch (5.08 m) reflector
60 inch Telescope	60 inch (1.52 m) reflector
Oschin Telescope	48 inch (1.22 m) Schmidt Reflector
JPL Palomar Testbed Interferometer	Interferometer
Snoop	All-Sky Camera

The Hale Telescope

This 200 inch (5.08 m) telescope is named after astronomer George Ellery Hale. It was built by a Caltech-Carnegie Institution consortium using a Pyrex blank manufactured by Corning Glass Works. The telescope (the largest in the world at that time) saw 'first light' in 1949.

The Hale Telescope is operated by a consortium of Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Cornell University. ^*

For a history of the 200-inch (5.08 m) instrument's construction find a copy of The Perfect Machine by Ronald Florence, ISBN 0-06-018205-9.

Although the Hale Telescope has been used to discover hundreds of asteroids, it should be mentioned that its tenth-scale engineering model still resides in Corning, New York, home of the Corning Glass Works, and was used to discover at least one minor planet, (34419) Corning .

Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

The Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS), sponsored by the National Geographic institute, was completed in 1958 (The first plates were shot in November 1948 and the last in April 1958). This survey was performed using 14 inch² or (6 degree)² blue-sensitive (Kodak 103a-O) and red-sensitive (Kodak 103a-E) photographic plates on the 48 inch (1.22 m) Samuel Oschin Schmidt reflecting telescope. The survey covered the sky from a declination of +90 degrees (celestial north pole) to -27 degrees and all right ascensions and had a sensitivity to +22 magnitudes (about 1 million times fainter than the limit of human vision). A southern extension extending the sky coverage of the POSS to -33 degrees declination was shot in 1957 - 1958. The final POSS consisted of 937 plate pairs.

J.B. Whiteoak, an Australian radio astronomer, used the same instrument to extend this survey further south to about -45 degrees declination, using the same field centers as the corresponding northern declination zones. Unlike the POSS, the Whiteoak extension consisted only of red-sensitive (Kodak 103a-E) photographic plates.

Until the completion of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), POSS was the most extensive wide-field sky survey ever. When completed, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey will surpass the POSS in depth, although the POSS covers almost 2.5 times as much area on the sky. POSS also exists in digitized form (i.e., the photographic plates were scanned), both in photographic form as the Digital Sky Survey (DSS) and in catalog form as the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner (MAPS) Catalog [http://aps.umn.edu/.

Current research

One of the current ongoing research programs at Palomar is the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program.

This program makes use of the Palomar Quasar Equatorial Survey Team (QUEST) Variability survey ^* that began in the autumn of 2001 to map a band of sky around the equator. This search switched to a new camera installed on the 48 inch (1.22 m) Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at Palomar in summer of 2003 and the results are used by several projects, including the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking project. Another program that uses the QUEST results discovered 90377 Sedna on November 14, 2003, and around 40 Kuiper belt objects. Other programs that share the camera are Shri Kulkarni's search for gamma-ray bursts (this takes advantage of the automated telescope's ability to react as soon as a burst is seen and take a series of snapshots of the fading burst), Richard Ellis' search for supernovae to test whether the universe's expansion is accelerating or not, and S. George Djorgovski's quasar search.

The camera itself is a mosaic of 112 Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) covering the whole (4 degree by 4 degree) field of view of the Schmidt telescope, the largest CCD mosaic used in an astronomical camera when built.

Directors

Ira Sprague Bowen, 1948–1964
Horace Welcome Babcock, 1964–1978
Maarten Schmidt, 1978–1980
Gerry Neugebauer, 1980–1994
James A. Westphal, 1994–1997
Wallace Leslie William Sargent, 1997–2000
Richard Salisbury Ellis, 2000–2006
Shri Kulkarni, 2006–?

External links

References