Palomar Observatory

Benjamin, Samuel and Steven ascend the steps to the Hale Telescope

The Palomar Observatory has been on my bucket list for a few years. We finally made it out to Cal Tech's working observatory in December while Benjamin was home from college for winter break. It's about a two hour drive northeast of San Diego, and beautiful all the way. As an added bonus, there was old snow on the ground when we arrived, plenty for an impromtu snow fight among brothers.

After Benjamin and Samuel pummeled each other with the white stuff, we made our way to George Ellery Hale's greatest project, the 200 inch telescope that saw first light in 1949. Hale had secured funding in 1928, but it took another two decades to finish this beautiful, massive telescope. It was fittingly named after Hale, who himself was a renowned astronomer. The Hale telescope was the largest in the world until the Keck telescope was completed in Hawaii in 1992.  It's still in use daily by Cal Tech astronomers, who used it, among other things, to locate quasars -- galaxies very, very far from Earth with black holes at their centers.

The base of the Hale Telescope is visible behind Benjamin, Samuel and Steven.  

After the refreshing cold snap of Palomar, we stopped on the way home for lunch in Fallbrook, as the temperature climbed to 80. We tried the famous "Nessy Burgers" located off Old Highway 395. Very good, very big burgers.  And not a chain.

Samuel poses in the Nessy Burgers cut out.  The burgers are as big as displayed. 

Our trip to Palomar inspired Samuel to shop out a nice telescope for our very own back yard.  He is now equipped with several amateur astronomer books, and we'll take our Meade Polaris 130 with us when we take a trip to Yosemite this Spring.  In the meantime, he's got some cool shots of the moon and taken time elapsed pictures of the night sky.  See below.

View of the moon from our new backyard telescope