The Journey to Palomar

[rabbithutch]

Watched a PBS feature tonight. It was the biography of George Ellery Hale. It included a great deal of history about the Yerkes telescope and the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar telescopes, the latter named after Mr. Hale. He was a remarkable man. I highly recommend it to any who have the opportunity to view it.

At the end of the program, focus was on the Hale telescope. It is a 200" pyrex disc. It's history was fascinating, taking more than a decade - interrupted by WWII - to complete.

A fact I knew nothing about was the adaptation of electronics to the telescope that increased its effective light gathering capability by at least an order of magnitude. The commentator made the statement that it took a mirror the size of a living room and effectively increased it to the size of a parking lot.

I wonder if that would be possible to scale back the electronics to an 8" reflector? Imagine what that might do for us amateurs? I'd have to get a EQ mount to replace the dob, but I think it would be worth it.

[blackparticle]

That sounds interesting, I'll have to keep an eye out on the web for it to see what you mean about the electronics.

I was watching a doc about the Mt Wilson observatory and the analysis of cepheid variables to gauge distances. They had some of the old photographic plates of Andromeda and I thought it was quite amazing how the pictures here make those images look more like the faint fuzzies I get when viewing through a small scope.

It's a pity they didn't have any means back then of working out a way to stack their photographic plates. Although it may actually be possible to do it in a dark room as opposed to a computer by running the film negatives in sequence in the developer onto a single plate. The alignment would have to be spot-on of course.

I wonder if any of those early images are available to download online? I'm sure they could be stacked using a modern digital process. I'd love to see the results of that.

[LeoLion]

Hi guys n gals, " Journey to Palomar" is available in the UK on DVD and well worth watching . Just make sure your DVD device can play the 'regional setting' of your chosen DVD. Prices look to be under 12 squid.

The Palomar 200" and the Mount Wilson scopes were the 'biggies' when I was starting my astro journey. My local library bound National Geographic Magazines and I could see there what was taking place at the astro 'frontiers' at the time . The faces of Hubble and Humason were very familiar !

[FraserClarke]

A fact I knew nothing about was the adaptation of electronics to the telescope that increased its effective light gathering capability by at least an order of magnitude. The commentator made the statement that it took a mirror the size of a living room and effectively increased it to the size of a parking lot.

I wonder if that would be possible to scale back the electronics to an 8" reflector? Imagine what that might do for us amateurs? I'd have to get a EQ mount to replace the dob, but I think it would be worth it.

What the commentator is refering to is the efficiency gain you get from CCDs (~100% efficient) compared to photographic film (3--10% efficient). So, when you start using CCDs you effectively detect 10x more light than you did with a photographic plate, so your telescope seems like it is 10x larger!

So I'm afraid amateurs already are benefitting from the same technology by having CCD cameras

Palomar is a great observatory, and it's still doing cutting edge science. If you want to keep up to date with what's going on at Palomar, I can recommend Scott Kardel's excellent blog;

Palomar Skies