Word: palomar
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Great telescopes such as the 200-incher on Palomar Mountain were designed for gathering faint starlight from a wide area and concentrating it in an image bright enough to make a photograph in a practical length of time. The limit of this method has probably been reached; big telescopes are wickedly expensive and hard to build. So forward-looking astronomers are now looking for other ways to brighten a telescopic image...
Astronomer Ira S. Bowen of Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories is confident that even small instruments circling above the earth's atmosphere can gather information about the stars that is inaccessible to telescopes on the earth's surface. Pictures taken from a satellite will never get back to earth intact, but Bowen suggests that the plates be developed automatically, scanned by electronic apparatus and sent to earth by radio like wirephotos...
...threw cosmology into a state of confusion from which it has not yet recovered. Some cosmologists pointed out hopefully that his startling theory was based on comparatively few observations made with Mt. Wilson's 100-in. telescope. There remained a chance that the 200-in. Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain might prove that the universe really behaves in a more seemly manner. This week, at the Berkeley meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the cosmologists got the news from Palomar: the universe still appears to be expanding...
...best window on the universe is the 200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain. It is a good window, but not good enough to satisfy the astronomers. It sees only a billion light-years into space, and the universe is a great deal bigger than that. The astronomers would like to see more...
Instead, astronomers at Harvard and at Mt. Palomar, gathering evidence with "ordinary" telescopes and re-analyzing old data have shown that classical Cepheid variable star are actually brighter than had been assumed. Knowing the absolute or intrinsic brightness of these particular stars, and from their apparent brightness, astronomers can determine the distances of nearby galaxies. The new results show that these stars are brighter than previously suspected, so that the distances of the galaxies are about twice their older values. Thus the part of the universe that astronomers have probed has about eight times the volume they had thought...