15 replies to this topic

[vintageair]

I live near Mt Hamilton where the Lick observatory is and have seen the 36 inch refractor which is truly something out of a Victorian era science fiction novel. It was the largest from 1888 until they built the 40 inch one at Yerkes in Wisconsin in1897, 

 

I just bought a ten inch Apertura reflector on a Dobsonian mount and was planning to take it on a road trip to my brother's place in Tucson where there are some dark sky's and was thinking that along the way I could visit some historic telescopes like Mt Wilson where they have to 100 inch reflector, Palomar with the 200 inch reflector and Kitt Peak near Tucson.

 

These things fascinate me, it took like 15 years to grind the Palomar mirror

 

So does anyone else have tales to tell of visiting these historic marvels?

[deSitter]

I live near Mt Hamilton where the Lick observatory is and have seen the 36 inch refractor which is truly something out of a Victorian era science fiction novel. It was the largest from 1888 until they built the 40 inch one at Yerkes in Wisconsin in1897, 

 

I just bought a ten inch Apertura reflector on a Dobsonian mount and was planning to take it on a road trip to my brother's place in Tucson where there are some dark sky's and was thinking that along the way I could visit some historic telescopes like Mt Wilson where they have to 100 inch reflector, Palomar with the 200 inch reflector and Kitt Peak near Tucson.

 

These things fascinate me, it took like 15 years to grind the Palomar mirror

 

So does anyone else have tales to tell of visiting these historic marvels?

 

Mt. Wilson! I hope they still allow visits. Most important telescope ever made, the 100" Hooker telescope. Proved that "spiral nebulae" were actually "island universes". Ah me I miss dignified sciience language.

 

-drl

[photomagica]

Yes - Mt. Wilson offers tours. See: https://www.mtwilson.edu/tours/ On your way to Tucson, don't miss Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. The 24" Clark telescope is a wonder, as is the Pluto telescope. Or you can go south from Pasadena and see Palomar on the way to Tucson. Near Tucson don't miss the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and there is the U of Arizona Mirror Lab right in Tucson. Lots to see!

Happy travels!

[vintageair]

Thanks for adding Lowell, they just did a restoration on it. He fabricated an entire Martian civilization that never existed from his visions through that scope. 

[TOMDEY]

A friend of mine got a ride in the Palomar Hale Telescope's "Prime Focus Observer's Cage" for expediting the delivery of 14x14-inch photographic plates to the mountain (used in the 48-inch Schmidt Camera). Rodney and I got a nice tour of the Kitt Peak telescopes for consulting on ~Light Pollution~ there. (Thanks, David Crawford!) I was designing our patented highly-efficant Low Pressure Sodium Street Lights at the time for ITT Lighting Division... which would have been a tremendous benefit to astronomy. Alas --- municipalities wanted nothing to do with "yellow light". The rest is history --- so much for environmentalism (energy conservation and light pollution mitigation). In the end --- it's all about money... nothing else. Some things never change.    Tom

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[Jay_Reynolds_Freeman]

I worked as a volunteer helper at Lick's summer visitor programs for a couple of decades, usually bringing a telescope but also assisting with managing lines of visitors inside the building. I have had many looks through the 36-inch refractor -- which is indeed probably one of the most "Steampunk" locations on the US West Coast -- and once had a very carefully supervised turn at controlling it at shutdown time.

 

James Lick's coffin lies at the base of the 36-inch's pier, under the moving floor. We all understood that if his ghost ever showed up, we should say "Thank you!" and let him look through the telescope for as long as he wished. I used to mention the coffin to younger visitors, waiting to go into the dome for a view, and also tell them that so far this evening, not everyone who has gone into the dome has come out. That was of course true, since at any given time the last round of viewers was still in there, but if I said it in a sufficiently spooky tone the kids got a little worried.

 

 

Clear sky ...

[Jay_Reynolds_Freeman]

And when I was a graduate student in physics at U. C. Berkeley (working on an astronomical topic), I once arranged to have a "Passed Japan Telescope Makers" inspection sticker pasted onto the control panel of the 120-inch. I got a tour of that instrument some years later, but alas, it wasn't still there.

 

Clear sky ...

[deSitter]

A friend of mine got a ride in the Palomar Hale Telescope's "Prime Focus Observer's Cage" for expediting the delivery of 14x14-inch photographic plates to the mountain (used in the 48-inch Schmidt Camera). Rodney and I got a nice tour of the Kitt Peak telescopes for consulting on ~Light Pollution~ there. (Thanks, David Crawford!) I was designing our patented highly-efficant Low Pressure Sodium Street Lights at the time for ITT Lighting Division... which would have been a tremendous benefit to astronomy. Alas --- municipalities wanted nothing to do with "yellow light". The rest is history --- so much for environmentalism (energy conservation and light pollution mitigation). In the end --- it's all about money... nothing else. Some things never change.    Tom

 

We gained a full magnitude in central Atlanta when our sodium street lights were replaced with LEDs - the fixtures send the light down and not out. In the sodium days, puffy clouds over downtown at deep dusk were illuminated like spacecraft hovering over the city. Now they are dark shadows seen mostly because they block the sky behind. 

 

The moral is - it's not the light so much as how bright it is and where it is sent. The fixture is everything. And although I haven't broken out a photometer to check, my sense from the streetlight on the corner of my front yard, is that during the sodium days it was incredibly brighter than the LED that replaced it. I can now observe Moon and planets from my front yard, which was all but impossible before.

 

-drl

[bobhen]

On your way to Tucson, don't miss Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. The 24" Clark telescope is a wonder, as is the Pluto telescope. Or you can go south from Pasadena and see Palomar on the way to Tucson. Near Tucson don't miss the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and there is the U of Arizona Mirror Lab right in Tucson. Lots to see!

Happy travels!

I also got to visit both of the above (in bold0. The 24" Clark is a wonder. The Mayall is the largest telescope I've seen. The  size of the telescope is surprising.

 

Bob  

[TOMDEY]

We gained a full magnitude in central Atlanta when our sodium street lights were replaced with LEDs - the fixtures send the light down and not out. In the sodium days, puffy clouds over downtown at deep dusk were illuminated like spacecraft hovering over the city. Now they are dark shadows seen mostly because they block the sky behind. 

 

The moral is - it's not the light so much as how bright it is and where it is sent. The fixture is everything. And although I haven't broken out a photometer to check, my sense from the streetlight on the corner of my front yard, is that during the sodium days it was incredibly brighter than the LED that replaced it. I can now observe Moon and planets from my front yard, which was all but impossible before.

 

-drl

Yep --- that's good.

 

The sodium you describe is junky High Pressure Sodium. The Low Pressure Sodium I designed were my patented highly-beamed cutoff fixtures. We (B&L research labs contracted to ITT Lighting) built the prototypes, which performed magnificently. I even did the placement and cost analysis for the program. The word "efficant" is used to denote that the light efficiently goes to where it is needed, not elsewhere. These lights therefore enjoy both benefits --- 1) no light going up or into drivers' eyes, all of it going uniformly to the intended streets and sidewalks, nowhere else 2) extremely narrowband spectrum = can be filtered out for astronomy.    Tom

[ccwemyss]

Near Tucson don't miss the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and there is the U of Arizona Mirror Lab right in Tucson. Lots to see!

Happy travels!

The Mayall is an impressive scope, but I'm always reminded of the deadly accident that happened there. The astronomers don't actually think that highly of it -- the placement on the mountain and the design of the tower are problematic for seeing. But it does make a good lightning rod. I've seen it get hit multiple times in one storm. They prefer the 3.5m Wynn, which is better placed and has active optics. 

 

My personal favorites are:

 

McMath-Pierce solar telescope (looking deep down the shaft to the primary and back up the actively temperature-controlled upper section to the heliostats is quite the experience. It's an amazing piece of 20th century engineering. Getting to watch the sun set and see the green flash with one of the auxiliary scopes was awesome. 

 

The 2.1m is just massive. The mount was built by a company that made ships for WWII and it looks like it. In my classes I still use spectral data for some open cluster stars that I got from it.

 

The 25m VLBA radio telescope is also worth seeing, even if they don't let you walk around in the dish like we did. It's just amazing to think about it gathering data while perfectly synchronized with the other VLBA sites using coordinated atomic clocks. Fun fact: after the clocks were synchronized at NIST and then flown to the different sites, they had to be recalibrated to compensate for the relativistic time shift resulting from their movement. 

 

I'm also partial to the 0.9m Wynn, but mainly because I've done four nights of observing with it, and I have a soft spot for Boller and Chivens. The second time I was there, with my students, one of them was looking down into it and discovered there was a garbage bag resting on the primary. Nobody had any idea how long it had been there. The tech improvised by putting a wad of duct tape on the end of a broom handle to pull it out. 

 

Another thing that most visitors miss, but is fascinating, is the giant concrete rain collector that looks like a big parking lot. Most of the water for the observatory is gathered by it during the rainy season and stored in underground tanks. During dry years, they have to truck water to the top. 

 

The whole place is truly amazing, and well worth planning a full day for visiting. You can also pay for nighttime programs. If you're willing to pay the big bucks, you can even have a whole night of observing with the visitor center telescopes, stay in one of the dorms, and get to experience "night lunch" where you can hobnob with the visiting researchers. 

 

Chip W. 

[Don W]

Lowell has a very active outreach program with many telescopes available.

Although I live in AZ now, I was in a couple of clubs in Wisconsin. Yerkes sponsored many observing nights with the 40” Clark for clubs over the years. We took advantage of them many times!

 I have also been on a couple of backdoor tours of the 3.9 meter scope at Siding Springs Observatory in Australia.

[vintageair]

Which telescope is the one that some disgruntled scientist put a couple nine mm rounds into the mirror?

[Tiredeyes]

The McDonald 107 inch in 1970. See Wikipedia for details. Search McDonald Observatory Shooting.

[deSitter]

The McDonald 107 inch in 1970. See Wikipedia for details. Search McDonald Observatory Shooting.

 

It has a cannon ball sized hole in the middle after all!

 

https://astroanecdot...oting-incident/

 

Robert, you need to get a selfie with this mirror

 

-drl

Edited by deSitter, 25 April 2025 - 11:35 PM.

[Terra Nova]

I’ve toured Lick, Mt. Wilson, Palomar, Kitt Peak, Lowell, and Mauna Kea, yet Yerkes is the closest to me and I’ve never been there!

Edited by Terra Nova, 30 April 2025 - 11:50 AM.