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Caltech's Palomar Observatory, in San Diego County,
is home to the venerable Hale 200-inch Telescope, as well as the 60-inch
instrument, the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope, and an 18-inch Schmidt camera. Come
visit the Palomar Observatory website. For observer
information, instrument specs, and telescope schedules, please visit the observers' site.
Keck Observatory
is perched atop the dormant volcano, Mauna Kea,
on the island of Hawaii. Keck is a joint effort of Caltech and the
University of California, consisting of twin 10-meter
telescopes, Keck I and Keck II.
Recently, the two telescopes have been used in combination, as
the Keck Interferometer ,
with sufficient power and resolution to detect planetary systems
around nearby stars.
We also have the old bluebook article
about the telescopes.
The Owens Valley Radio Observatory is located some
five hours north of Pasadena, near the Sierra Nevada range.
The Observatory is home to a variety of dishes and interferometers
and is the operations base for the
CARMA millimeter-wave interferometer.
Visit the official website
to learn more.
The Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy
(CARMA) is the merger of two university-based millimeter arrays
-- the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) millimeter array
and the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association (BIMA) millmeter
array -- to form a powerful astronomical tool for the new millennium.
The Chajnantor Observatory, is located at an altitude of 5080 m
in the Chilean Andes. It is the site of the Cosmic Background
Imager (CBI) and will be the site of the QUIET Project.
The site is accessible year-round and provides superb conditions
for cosmic microwave background observations.
The Caltech Submillimeter Observatory is a
10-meter dish atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. General information is
available in the bluebook article;
more details can be found at the
home page.
The Thirty Meter Telescope is a
project currently underway by Caltech, the University of California,
and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in
Astronomy (ACURA) to build
a 30-meter diameter telescope for astronomy at visible and
infrared wavelengths.
And at the other end of the size spectrum are the 0.35-meter and 0.25-meter
telescopes of the Robinson/Downs Rooftop Observatories. The Robinson 0.35-meter
(aka the Celestron-14) is used for undergraduate instruction, and is
also available for general use by authorized members of the Caltech and JPL
communities. The Downs 0.25-meter (C-10) will be coming on line soon
for a similar role. See the RDRO page for more
information.
The Big Bear Solar Observatory is a world center
for observations of the Sun. Since July 1997, the facility has
been managed by the New Jersey Institute of Technology for
a university consortium which includes Caltech. Read the
bluebook entry to find out what
the scopes are doing in the middle of a lake, or go check out the
website.