About the legendary telescope at Palomar Mountain. Video for Palomar Observatory and its bilingual virtual tour: https://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/visitor/media/palomartour/ | Palomar Observatory

We are excited to share that the Palomar Observatory Gift and Book Store is now online at https://store.palomar.caltech.edu. For many years the gift store in the Observatory’s Greenway Center has offered Palomar and astronomy-themed merchandise for our visitors, astronomers, and staff. Updating the gift store in a modern e-commerce context will greatly enhance our ability to serve Palomar enthusiasts near and far with a variety of apparel, books, graphics, and gifts. So if you’re like us and you

The Hale Telescope dome is the central feature on the Palomar Observatory compound, and a grand expression of architecture and engineering in its own right. Any development as large as the Hale dome has many contributors, and a team of nearly 100 workers were active for three years (1936-1938) realizing the Hale dome vision. Key contributions were made by Russell Porter who served as observatory principal architect, dome lead engineer Mark Serrurier, the dome steel structure contractor Consolida

Observatory Closure Notice The observatory will be closed to the public on Wednesday, 11/5, and Thursday, 11/6 while the 200-inch mirror is cleaned and re-aluminized. ✨ This special aluminizing process only happens every two years and is essential for keeping the telescope performing at its best. What is the aluminizing process like? It involves carefully removing, cleaning, and coating the giant mirror with a thin layer of aluminum to ensure maximum reflectivity — a truly fascinating behind-the

The Hale Telescope is used every night for astronomical research thanks to a modern and evolving instrument suite. Some of the Hale instrumentation uses adaptive optics capabilities that correct for distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere—known as seeing, what makes stars twinkle—to deliver sharp images comparable to those produced by space telescopes from a ground-based facility. PALM-3000 is the facility adaptive optics system for the Hale Telescope. The heart of the system is a deformable mi