Friends of Palomar Observatory 2009 Events

June

Event is Full! Saturday, June 6 from 5:00 - 10:00 p.m. - Tour of the 200-inch Hale Telescope followed by viewing through the Palomar 60-inch Telescope (weather permitting). Due to the great demand and limited number of nights available for the Friends to use to 60" telescope, we regret that this season we cannot allow individual members to bring guests.

July

Saturday, July 18 from 6:00 - 10:00 p.m. at the Palomar Outreach Center - Anthony Cook of Griffith Observatory will present:

"In 1928, George Ellery Hale gathered the leading designers of telescopes together in Pasadena to propose ideas for a daring new giant telescope. Their formidable task-create a 200-inch eye that bends no more than 1/50 millionth in a 56 foot-long tube that sags less than a millimeter while its 150-ton structure precisely acquires and smoothly tracks celestial objects for hours. A marvelous series of drawings by the project artist Russell W. Porter--made over a decade and kept out of public sight during the creation of the telescope--illustrate how the designers and civil engineers triumphed in their quest and produced what is still a legend of modern technology."

August

Saturday, August 8 (new date!) from 6:30 - 10:00 p.m. at the Palomar Outreach Center

Astronomer Virginia Trimble presents "Palomar's Greatest Hits". Her talk will be followed by viewing through the 60-inch telescope (weather permitting).

From Dr. Trimble:

The 200" Hale Telescope and 48" Schmidt on Palomar Mountain were the largest productive telescopes of their type for something like 40 years. During that period, data collected with them led to the discovery of quasars, the recognition of the largest scale structures in the universe, multiple corrections to distance scales in the universe, and much else that underlies modern astronomy and cosmology. The talk will explore a handful of these major contributions, while putting the Palomar telescopes in the scientific and cultural contexts in which they flourished.

About Dr. Trimble:

Virginia Trimble is a native Californian and a graduate of Hollywood High School, UCLA, and Caltech. In addition to her current position as professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine, she has worked at Smith College, Cambridge University, and (for 28 years) as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include the structure and evolution of stars, galaxies, and the universe, and of the communities of scientists who study them. She holds or has held positions, generally at about the level of vice president, in the American Astronomical Society, the American Physical Society, the International Astronomical Union, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Her list of publications now exceeds 600, for which the only excuse is that she reads many more papers per year than that.

Previous Events for 2009

January

January 24, 2009 @ 1:00 p.m. - Scott Kardel gave a talk on the building of the 200-inch Hale Telescope. The event was two days before the 60th anniversary of Edwin Hubble's "first light" photos taken with the Hale on January 26, 1949.

The event was held in the observatory's new outreach center and was followed by a tour of the 200-inch Hale Telescope.

May

Friday, May 8 from 7:00 - 10:00 p.m. - Viewing through the Palomar 60-inch Telescope under beautiful skies.

See the