Word: palomar
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...world's most troublesome piece of glass, the 200-in. mirror of Palomar's Hale telescope, is back in shape again. Observatory Director Dr. Ira S. Bowen announced last week that the mirror, which was taken out for repolishing last May, has been tested on the stars and pronounced O.K. In places as much as 20 millionths of an inch of glass was polished off. Next step will be to cover the mirror with its shining coat of aluminum. Dr. Bowen hopes the big telescope will be hunting nebulae again by the first of the year...
Studying a sky photograph taken last month with their new 48-in. Schmidt telescope, two astronomers at Palomar Observatory spotted a thin streak made by a rapidly moving object. When the streak, in slightly different positions, showed up on later photographs, the astronomers were sure they had seen something new. Last week Drs. Seth B. Nicholson and Robert S. Richardson announced that the streak was an asteroid (midget planet) only nine-tenths of a mile in diameter and about 8,000,000 miles away from the earth...
Such great telescopes as the 200-incher on Mt. Palomar see only tiny patches of sky. They need a more wide-eyed instrument to tell them where to look. Last week CalTech and the National Geographic Society announced a joint project to map the whole sky in search of interesting objects for big telescopes to study in detail. The society will supply the funds; CalTech, which runs Palomar Observatory, will supply the Schmidt telescope to do the mapping...
...Palomar's Schmidt (called the "Big S") has a 72-in. mirror and a 48-in. correcting plate. It takes 14 in.-by-14 in. pictures that cover a square of sky as wide as twelve moons placed edge to edge in a row. The 200-in. sees only half the diameter of a single moon. At that rate, it would take the 200-in. about 5,000 years to observe the whole...
Optical experts know that the 200-inch Palomar mirror, even though it works well now, can work even better after a delicate repolishing of its outer ten inches. The great telescope will not start on its real program of charting the outer universe until it is as perfect as scientific skill can make it. The world's astronomers, impatient for news from a billion light-years away, do not mind waiting a little longer...