Palomar Observatory

I really hope that weather permits our visit to Palomar at the end of the quarter! Palomar Observatory, owned and operated by Caltech, was the sight of many important discoveries over the course of the 20th century.

In the 1930s, armed with a mere 18-in telescope and the virial theorem, astronomer Fritz Zwicky looked at supernovae from other galaxies and discovered the first evidence for Dark Matter.

The first time a quasar was optically identified and an optical spectrum obtained happened at Palomar in 1962, using the 200-in Hale Telescope, which was the world's largest from 1949 to 1992, when Keck I  took that honor.

In 1993, using using the same 18-in telescope Zwicky used, astronomers discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which was in orbit around Jupiter. It is believed that the fragments they discovered were apart of a single larger comet which was torn apart by Jupiter's intense gravitational forces. This comet collided with Jupiter in 1994, a very famous astronomical event that had the attention of the world's telescopes.

In 1995, a 60-in telescope at Palomar was one of the instruments used to confirm the existence of brown dwarfs.

In 2002, a 48-in telescope at Palomar discovered Quaoar, a frozen 800 mile diameter planetoid in the Kuiper belt.  The same telescope also discovered Sedna, the most distant known object orbiting our Sun, with an aphelion of 937 AU!

These are just a few examples of the important observational discoveries for which Palomar Observatory can be credited. Here is a short video of the process of cleaning a large mirror at Palomar. It is worth while to see the work that goes into maintaining these instruments.