The image, which shows a billowing nebula dotted with stars, marked the start of what was to be the world's largest effective optical telescope for the next 44 years, until the W. We have robotic telescopes like ZTF, and we can handle much more data than before due to processing with computers and machine learning. From left to right are: Greg Van Idsinga, Carolyn Heffner, Diana Roderick, Kathleen Koviak, and Paul Nied.

Hubble also discovered that galaxies are flying away from us, indicating the expansion of space itself, a finding that provided the first hints of the explosive Big Bang that produced our universe. Accepted interns will be brought to the STScI campus in Baltimore, Maryland, to work directly with their mentors.

Zwicky used the 48-inch (and an 18-inch prototype) to discover more than 120 supernovae, holding the record for the most supernova discoveries by a single astronomer until 2009. The Hale Telescope, known affectionately by many during its development as the Big Eye, is celebrating is 75th "first-light" anniversary this month. The Russian Large Altazimuth Telescope, which is larger than Palomar, opened in 1975 but never operated at its theoretical limits). Although clouds and atmospheric turbulence threatened to derail his latest observ run, "In the end, the data are pretty good," he says.

One of these, the Samuel Oschin Telescope, a workhorse also known as the 48-inch, recently celebrated its own 75th anniversary (its first light occurred in September 1948). Most 8" Dobs weigh a total of about 50 lbs, evenly divided between the OTA and base, making the heaviest single piece around 25 lbs, with an overall total height/length of about 55 inches, give or take a couple. Hale was a one-man show who had a hunger to make things happen," said Kulkarni in a Caltech news story about Hale. Neugebauer's graduate student Andrea Ghez (PhD '92), a Nobel laureate now at UCLA, used Palomar for her Caltech PhD thesis, which showed that most young stars in dense star-forming clouds form in pairs. The Exploratorium will be broadcasting live from the path of totality in Junction, Texas and Torreón, Mexico.

Ultimately, Palomar Mountain northeast of San Diego was chosen as the observatory's site, but it would be another 20 years—a decade after Hale's death—before the observatory finally opened. The giant eye allowed astronomers to see farther back into space than ever before—and farther back in time, since light from those distant objects can take billions of years to reach us. But you can't complete the discovery process without ancillary telescopes to pursue the newfound objects, including the 60-inch, the 200-inch, and Keck. So my recommendation would be: As long as it's cheap and you don't mind possibly some handiwork, go for it.