This morning was an early start, we drove from Brea to Palomar Observatory to take the observatory tour. We were fortunate to have an "insiders" tour, so we actually got to go inside the dome of the 200" Hale Telescope.
It was great to be able to see the scope up close. One new thing that I saw was the laser system which is going to be used for adaptive optics. Although it's almost ready for full use, it's still in the engineering stage at this time. Eventually the Palomar staff hope to achieve resolution that will be high enough to allow the scope to take better images than the Hubble Space Telescope.
We also got to walk the catwalk around the dome outside, and could see several other domes scattered around the mountain.
Sadly, the 18" Schmidt is being mothballed right now and will soon become a museum piece.
We also got a close up of the Palomar Testbed Interferometer, a system of 3 roll-off roof observatories with 16" scopes whose light is combined.
After the tour Wayne and I drove back to Tucson, so I'm now home and planning my next observatory tour, which will be of Xanadu Observatory :-)
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