Hale went on to leave his fingerprints on the great American telescopes of his time. He would make plans to build a large telescope and obtain the financial backing. Hale was constantly trying to look deeper into the sky. On January 26, 1949, the Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory sees first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble,[] becoming the largest aperture optical telescope (until BTA-6 was built in 1976).. George Ellery Hale. Palomar was his crowning achievement. Mt. It was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the first observations were made in 1949. When constructed in 1948, the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California was the largest-aperture telescope in the world, at 200 inches twice as wide as the biggest telescope up to then, and remained such until the Soviet BTA, with a mirror 19% wider, was built in 1976. Photo of the base of the 200 inch Hale Telescope (a.k.a. According to Wikipedia it says, “The Hale telescope represented the technological limit in building large optical telescopes for over 30 years. George Ellery Hale was a solar astronomer, who was born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois [].He studied at MIT, Harvard and in Berlin. Working on Mt. Palomar) while being built at the Westinghouse Steam Turbine works in Philadelphia (1930’s) …

Wilson, Hubble complained bitterly to Hale about among other things the quality of the Hooker's 100-inch mirror and the telescope's inability to observe the northern reaches of the sky. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble When Halley’s comet returns to our quarter of the universe this year, the great 200-inch Hale Telescope, perched high on Palomar Mountain in California, will follow it across the sky. It was the largest telescope in the world until the Russian BTA-6 was built in 1976, and the second largest until the construction of the Keck Observatory Keck 1 in 1993”. So even as the 60-inch reflecting telescope was being built, Hale was looking for the funding for a reflector with a 100-inch mirror. Telescopes here on the ground -- which also must peer through Earth's atmosphere -- are equally vulnerable to our atmosphere's visual tricks. Dedicated in 1948 and the largest effective telescope in the world until 1993, the 200-inch Hale Telescope is a workhorse of modern astronomy and contributes to a wide range of astronomical research including Solar System studies, the search for extrasolar planets, stellar population and evolution analysis, and the characterization of remote galaxies. The Hale Telescope had its first light in late 1949, and it has been one of the premier instruments for astronomy ever since. At the same time, George Hale wanted to build a telescope that would expand the capabilities of the Hooker Telescope while also making up for its defects.
By the 1990s, technology advanced far enough to usher in an era of telescopes 8 to 10 meters across (26 to 33 feet), and the same story played out once more. Hale Telescope, one of the world’s largest and most powerful reflecting telescopes, located at the Palomar Observatory, Mount Palomar, Calif. Built by Hale with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the creation of its mirror and building began in the 1920s. These turned out to be supermassive black holes accreting matter in the centers of galaxies, a science-fiction fantasy when the Hale Telescope was built. Astronomer George Ellery Hale built the world's largest telescope four times over, each new instrument trumping the last. The telescope was names the Hale telescope in his honor. That's why astronomers around the world dreamed of having an observatory in space -- a concept first proposed by astronomer Lyman Spitzer in the 1940s. It was painstakingly built, and its mirror carefully hauled up the mountain in 1947, just two years before its first light. He invented the spectroheliograph, which he used to photograph the Sun in the line of Ca. Hale wanted a telescope that could collect more light. Then he would gather the people and materials to carry out the plan, and have the telescope built — all while working on ideas for the next, even bigger telescope. He also built … The telescope was named in honour of the noted American "The telescopes he built are just magnificent, and the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar is still doing cutting-edge science today, 70 years after it opened. He found it in Los Angeles businessman John D. Hooker, who wanted his name attached to the largest telescope ever built.