Samuel Oschin telescope, Schmidt camera telescope at Palomar Observatory, San Diego County, United States.
The Samuel Oschin telescope is a Schmidt camera on Palomar Mountain in San Diego County, California, fitted with a large mirror and a wide corrector lens that together capture broad fields of the sky in a single exposure. It sits within the Palomar Observatory complex, which houses several other telescopes and is operated by Caltech.
Construction began in 1939 and the instrument entered service in 1948, initially known simply as the 48-inch Schmidt telescope. In 1986 it was renamed to honor Samuel Oschin, a philanthropist who supported the observatory financially.
The telescope is closely associated with sky surveys that produced large photographic atlases used by astronomers around the world for decades. Visitors to the observatory can see the dome from the outside and learn about these surveys at the on-site exhibits.
The observatory sits on Palomar Mountain at roughly 5,500 feet (about 1,700 meters), where temperatures can be cool even in summer, so bringing an extra layer is a good idea. Visitors can see the telescope dome during daytime self-guided tours, though access to the inside of the dome is limited.
The instrument has no eyepiece, meaning it was never used for direct visual observation and works only as a camera that records the sky onto photographic plates. More than 19,000 of these glass plates from decades of observations are still kept at the observatory.
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