Palomar Observatory overwhelmed by stargazers

By: QUINN EASTMAN - Staff Writer | Saturday, June 25, 2005 11:17 PM PDT ∞

PALOMAR MOUNTAIN ---- Thousands of astronomy lovers from across Southern California lined up to get a close look at Palomar Observatory's world-renowned telescopes Saturday during the observatory's first-ever open house.

Organizers were surprised and excited by the turnout, which created parking headaches and left some visitors waiting in the summer sun for up to two hours in front of the 200-inch Hale telescope's gleaming white dome.

Richard Ellis, the scientific director of the observatory, estimated that around 3,000 visitors attended the open house, many more than the expected 500.

"We're committed to having this again, but we're going to need help," he said. "Perhaps next year or in a couple years. We've got to think about ways to improve access to the Hale."

The son of a man who worked on the construction of the Hale telescope left in frustration after seeing how long the line was.

Hugh Young of Escondido, who came with a book of family photos he was donating to the observatory, said his father, Tom Young, had installed the plumbing at Palomar Observatory in the 1930s.

The observatory is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology, a private research university based in Pasadena.

Many visitors came from Caltech, such as Robert Raussendorf, a physicist originally from Germany who came for the day from Pasadena with his wife, Andrea.

Even though the wait was long to see the Hale telescope, the world's largest telescope from 1949 until 1993, visitors could hear lectures about the various fields of research under way at Palomar Observatory.

"Astronomy has always been a passion of mine," said Steve Chernicky, an aerospace engineer from Fallbrook. The main reason he came up was to hear some of the lectures, he said, as well as to see Palomar's 60-inch telescope, which had never been available for viewing by the public before.

In the first lecture, Ellis described planning for a 30-meter (1,180-inch) telescope that will dwarf the Hale and its successors as the largest, the twin telescopes on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The new telescope will have 738 separate mirrors, and construction is expected to begin in 2008.

"A telescope is a time machine," Ellis said. The larger a telescope is, the more power it has to resolve light from the most distant stars and galaxies, he said.

The more distant galaxies' light left them billions of years ago, so if astronomers can see far enough away, they can see the first galaxies and stars forming, he said.

Caltech astronomers are now deciding whether to build the next huge telescope in either Chile's Atacama Desert, on top of Hawaii's Mauna Kea or on a mountain in Baja California, Ellis said.

Francis O'Donovan, a Caltech graduate student, described his research using two of Palomar Observatory's smaller telescopes and telescopes in Arizona and Spain. He was looking for planets that orbit stars other than the Sun, until recently a very difficult task.

O'Donovan and his co-workers detect extrasolar planets by noticing a slight dimming of the light ---- just 2 percent in one case ---- from the star as the planet passes in front of it, he said.

Other lecturers described research on the formation of stars and planets, hunting for asteroids, and how astronomers can correct for the effect of the Earth's atmosphere on starlight, erasing stars' twinkle.

More information about public events at Palomar Observatory is available at:http://www.friendsofpalomarobservatory.org

Contact staff writer Quinn Eastman at (760) 740-5412 or qeastman@nctimes.com.

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