The Sunday Special: Sitting in Einstein’s chair

Overnight star party at Mt. Wilson turns into history lesson

Some 18 years ago, a friend who shared my astronomy bug called: Did I want to go to an overnight viewing party at Mt. Wilson?

The Mt. Wilson Observatory is something of a holy grail among amateur astronomers. Too close to the nighttime glare of Los Angeles to be of much use to modern researchers looking into the heavens, its smaller, 60-inch telescope could be rented out for the night for viewing parties.

Mt. Wilson. Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Both the 60-inch, and its 100-inch sibling, sit atop Mt. Wilson, 5,000 feet above Los Angeles. These were the telescopes used by George Ellery Hale last century to solve some of the biggest mysteries about how our universe is organized (galaxies populated by tens of millions of stars each).

The 60-inch telescope was completed in 1908, after a decade of work to grind the mirror to a perfect parabolic finish, and then to build the support structure. At the time, it was the world’s largest telescope — and photographs taken with it suggested that what looked like clouds on previous telescopes were in fact likely clusters of stars.