Today - June 3, 2013 - is the 65th anniversary of the dedication of the 200-inch Hale telescope at Mt Palomar in California. It was nicknamed "the Big Eye", but formally named for the solar astronomer whose vision created it, George Ellery Hale. Hale never saw it to completion as he died a decade before its dedication.
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Palomar Observatory which stands a mile above the California desert. Its 200-inch mirror was officially impossible to make, but George Ellery Hale's vision inspired a nation in the grip of the Great Depression and it became the jewel in the crown of astronomy for the second half of the twentieth century.