The 200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain is ailing. Installed last January, it has thus far taken no scientifically valuable photographs of the stars. Dr. Ira S. Bowen, director of the ...

The journey of astronomical telescopes began in the early 17th century when Galileo Galilei crafted his first refracting ...

Its 200-inch telescope was a marvel of engineering when Caltech founder Gregory Hale built it in the 1930s and 1940s. It finally saw “first light” — astronomers’ term for a telescope’s ...

Until then, the largest optical telescope in the Western Hemisphere had been the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope, built in 1949 on Mount Palomar in California and used by Edwin Hubble in the ...