Samuel Oschin telescope
Encyclopedia
Schmidt camera
A Schmidt camera, also referred to as the Schmidt telescope, is a catadioptric astrophotographic telescope designed to provide wide fields of view with limited aberrations. Other similar designs are the Wright Camera and Lurie-Houghton telescope....
at the Palomar Observatory
Palomar Observatory
Palomar Observatory is a privately owned observatory located in San Diego County, California, southeast of Pasadena's Mount Wilson Observatory, in the Palomar Mountain Range. At approximately elevation, it is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology...
in northern San Diego County, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. It consists of a 49.75-inch Schmidt corrector plate
Schmidt corrector plate
A Schmidt corrector plate is an aspheric lens which is designed to correct the spherical aberration in the spherical primary mirror it is combined with. It was invented by Bernhard Schmidt in 1931, although it may have been independently invented by Finnish astronomer Yrjö Väisälä in 1924...
and a 72-inch (f/2.5) mirror. The instrument is strictly a camera; there is no provision for an eyepiece to look through it. It originally used 10 and 14-inch glass photographic plate
Photographic plate
Photographic plates preceded photographic film as a means of photography. A light-sensitive emulsion of silver salts was applied to a glass plate. This form of photographic material largely faded from the consumer market in the early years of the 20th century, as more convenient and less fragile...
s. Since the focal plane is curved, these plates had to be preformed in a special jig before being loaded into the camera.
Construction on the Schmidt telescope began in 1939 and it was completed in 1948. It was named the Samuel Oschin
Samuel Oschin
Samuel Oschin , born in Detroit, was a Los Angeles entrepreneur and philanthropist, founder of the Mr and Mrs Samuel Oschin Family Foundation...
telescope in 1986, before that it was just called the 48 inch Schmidt.http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/SOTdisc.htm
The camera has been converted to use a CCD
Charge-coupled device
A charge-coupled device is a device for the movement of electrical charge, usually from within the device to an area where the charge can be manipulated, for example conversion into a digital value. This is achieved by "shifting" the signals between stages within the device one at a time...
imager. This is a mosaic of 112 CCDs covering the whole (4 degree by 4 degree) field of view
Field of view
The field of view is the extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment....
of the camera, the largest CCD mosaic used in an astronomical camera at this time. The corrector plate was recently replaced using glass that is transparent to a wider range of wavelengths. The camera was originally hand-guided through one of two 10-inch (25.5 cm) aperture refracting telescope
Refracting telescope
A refracting or refractor telescope is a type of optical telescope that uses a lens as its objective to form an image . The refracting telescope design was originally used in spy glasses and astronomical telescopes but is also used for long focus camera lenses...
s mounted on either side of the camera. The camera is now fully automated and remote-controlled. The data collected is transmitted over the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network
High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network
The High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network is a network research program, funded by the National Science Foundation. The program includes the creation, demonstration, and evaluation of a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in its Southern...
(HPWREN). It is programmed and operated primarily from Pasadena, California
Pasadena, California
Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...
with no operator on-site (except to open and close the dome).
The plate archive
About half of the large photographic glass plate negatives exposed on the telescope, some 19,000 in all, had been accumulating in the sub-basement of the Robinson building at the California Institute of TechnologyCalifornia Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
since 1949. In 2002, astronomer Jean Mueller
Jean Mueller
Jean Mueller is an American astronomer.Working at Palomar Observatory, she has discovered a total of 15 comets, including 7 periodic comets 120P/Mueller, 131P/Mueller, 136P/Mueller, 149P/Mueller, 173P/Mueller, 188P/LINEAR-Mueller, 190P/Mueller, and 8 non-periodic comets.She has also discovered 10...
approached Richard Ellis
Richard Ellis (astronomer)
Richard Salisbury Ellis CBE FRS is the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology ....
, the director of the Caltech Optical Observatories, to volunteer to the task of organizing the Oschin Telescope plate archive. Given the go-ahead, she recruited eleven volunteers from the Mount Wilson Observatory Association (MWOA) and the Los Angeles Astronomical Society (LAAS), and the team then spent 13 weekends (more than one thousand hours) poring over the stacks, placing plates in protective sleeves, and packing them in more than 500 boxes that were transported to Palomar.
All of the volunteers were presented with the gift of having asteroid
Asteroid
Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...
s named after them, compliments of Carolyn S. Shoemaker
Carolyn S. Shoemaker
Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker is an American astronomer and is a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. She holds the record for most comets discovered by an individual.- Personal life :...
: 10028 Bonus
10028 Bonus
10028 Bonus is a main belt asteroid, it was discovered on May 5th 1981 by Carolyn S. Shoemaker at Palomar Observatory.It was named in honor of Shelley R...
, 12680 Bogdanovich
12680 Bogdanovich
12680 Bogdanovich is a main-belt asteroid discovered on May 6, 1981 by C. S. Shoemaker at Palomar Observatory.- External links :*...
, 13914 Galegant
13914 Galegant
13914 Galegant is a main-belt asteroid discovered on June 11, 1980 by C. S. Shoemaker at Palomar Observatory.- External links :*...
, 16452 Goldfinger
16452 Goldfinger
16452 Goldfinger is a main-belt asteroid discovered on September 28, 1989 by C. S. Shoemaker and E. M. Shoemaker at Palomar Observatory.- External links :*...
, 19173 Virginiaterése
19173 Virginiaterése
19173 Virginiaterése is a main belt asteroid with an orbital period of 1381.1218899 days . The asteroid was discovered on April 15, 1991....
, 20007 Marybrown
20007 Marybrown
20007 Marybrown is a main-belt asteroid discovered on June 7, 1991 by C. S. Shoemaker and E. M. Shoemaker at Palomar.- External links :*...
, 21148 Billramsey
21148 Billramsey
21148 Billramsey is a main-belt asteroid discovered on April 16, 1993 by C. S. Shoemaker and E. M. Shoemaker at Palomar.- External links :*...
, 22294 Simmons
22294 Simmons
22294 Simmons is a main-belt asteroid discovered on September 28, 1989 by C. S. Shoemaker and E. M. Shoemaker at Palomar.- External links :*...
, 27706 Strogen
27706 Strogen
27706 Strogen is a main-belt asteroid discovered on October 11, 1985 by C. S. Shoemaker and E. M. Shoemaker at Palomar.- External links :*...
, and 29133 Vargas
29133 Vargas
29133 Vargas is a main-belt asteroid discovered on May 29, 1987 by C. S. Shoemaker and E. M. Shoemaker at Palomar.It was named in honor of Norman L...
. Mueller was also rewarded by a visit to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
.
Discoveries
The Oschin Telescope was responsible for the discovery of 90377 Sedna90377 Sedna
90377 Sedna is a trans-Neptunian object discovered in 2003, which was about three times as far from the Sun as Neptune. For most of its orbit it is even further from the Sun, with its aphelion estimated at 960 astronomical units , making it one of the most distant known objects in the Solar System...
on 2003-11-14 and Eris, the "10th Planet" on 2005-01-05 from images taken 2003-10-21. The peculiar Type Ia supernova
Type Ia supernova
A Type Ia supernova is a sub-category of supernovae, which in turn are a sub-category of cataclysmic variable stars, that results from the violent explosion of a white dwarf star. A white dwarf is the remnant of a star that has completed its normal life cycle and has ceased nuclear fusion...
SN 2002cx
SN 2002cx
SN 2002cx is a peculiar type Ia supernova. It was discovered in May 2002 by a team of researchers from LBL. It behaved differently than normal type Ia supernovae, and different from several other previously observed peculiar type Ia supernovae including SN 1991T and SN 1991bg.-Discovery:SN 2002cx...
was discovered with the Oschin telescope on 2002 May 12.21 UT. Other discoveries include 90482 Orcus
90482 Orcus
90482 Orcus is a trans-Neptunian object in the Kuiper belt with a large moon. It was discovered on February 17, 2004 by Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University. Precovery images as early as November 8, 1951 were later identified...
(in 2004) and 50000 Quaoar
50000 Quaoar
50000 Quaoar is a rocky trans-Neptunian object in the Kuiper belt with one known moon. Discovered on June 4, 2002 by astronomers Chad Trujillo and Michael Brown at the California Institute of Technology from images acquired at the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory, it is thought by...
(in 2002), both large trans-Neptune objects.
In June 2011 it was reported the telescope discovered 6 supernova
Supernova
A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. It is pronounced with the plural supernovae or supernovas. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months...
e located 8 billion light years from Earth whose composition lacks hydrogen. This is different than normal supernovaes, and will contribute to the research of star formation.
External links
- Information from the U.S. National Park Service
- Picture, c. 1960
- Edwin Hubble at the 48" Schmidt.
- Order comes to a plate-glass universe, Caltech336, Vol. 203, May 29, 2003
