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Lick Observatory lies high on a mountaintop overlooking Silicon Valley. Known for major contributions to astronomy, it also has some unusual features. Its benefactor James Lick is buried under the Great Refractor, and the observatory's original seismogram of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is on display.

Lick Observatory - 10 Fascinating Facts

The Great Refractor was once the largest telescope of its kind, and today it's still the second largest. A refracting telescope focuses incoming light using two lenses. The disks for the Lick Refractor were made in France, but made into lenses by Clark & Clark in Massachusetts. They then traveled to California by rail and up Mount Hamilton by horse and carriage. One of the lenses broke in transit, and it took nearly two decades to get a replacement.

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The 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mt Wilson Observatory was, for a time, the largest in the world. It was also of historical importance because of the discoveries that Edwin Hubble made with it. A few decades later it was eclipsed by the 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory.

Palomar Observatory
A mile above the California desert stands Palomar Observatory. 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.

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Telstar didn't itself change our lives, but it was the beginning of a revolution that has changed the way we live. Satellites make possible mobile phones, GPS, the Internet and live broadcasting from around the world. They also allow better weather monitoring, data about resources, surveying of natural events, and many astronomical uses.

Hard to imagine - or remember, if you're old enough - what things were like before then.

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The first Sputnik certainly changed the world. It was the first triumph of the space race between the USA and the USSR. And, more practically, it was the first of many satellites in orbit. What would we do without them now? Sputnik 1 was launched sixty years ago today on October 4, 1957.

Last edited by Mona - Astronomy; 10/04/17 02:20 PM.
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Forty years after launch Voyager 1 is still sending back data, though the amount of data has deiminished considerable. It's been headed out of the Solar System for some time, but has a very long way to go before it passes the Oort Cloud and is away. However on September 13, 2013 NASA announced that the spacecraft had crossed a boundary and was now in interstellar space where the Sun's influence doesn't prevail.

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