page_title: Hale Telescope
section_title: 200-inch mirror
hierarchical_section_title: Hale Telescope / Components / 200-inch mirror
caption_attribution_description: English: Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory, California Deutsch: Hale Teleskop, Palomar Observatorium, Kalifornien, USA
context_page_description: The Hale Telescope is a 200-inch, f/3.3 reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, US, named after astronomer George Ellery Hale. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, he orchestrated the planning, design, and construction of the observatory, but with the project ending up taking 20 years he did not live to see its commissioning. The Hale was groundbreaking for its time, with double the diameter of the second-largest telescope, and pioneered many new technologies in telescope mount design and in the design and fabrication of its large aluminum coated "honeycomb" low thermal expansion Pyrex mirror. It was completed in 1949 and is still in active use.
  The Hale Telescope represented the technological limit in building large optical telescopes for over 30 years. It was the largest telescope in the world from its construction in 1949 until the Russian BTA-6 was built in 1976, and the second largest until the construction of the Keck Observatory Keck 1 in 1993.
context_section_description: Originally, the Hale Telescope was going to use a primary mirror of fused quartz manufactured by General Electric, but instead the primary mirror was cast in 1934 at Corning Glass Works in New York State using Corning's then new material called Pyrex (borosilicate glass). Pyrex was chosen for its low expansion qualities so the large mirror would not distort the images produced when it changed shape due to temperature variations (a problem that plagued earlier large telescopes).
  The mirror was cast in a mold with 36 raised mold blocks (similar in shape to a waffle iron). This created a honeycomb mirror that cut the amount of Pyrex needed down from over 40 short tons (36 t) to just 20 short tons (18 t), making a mirror that would cool faster in use and have multiple "mounting points" on the back to evenly distribute its weight (note – see external links 1934 article for drawings). The shape of a central hole was also part of the mold so light could pass through the finished mirror when it was used in a Cassegrain configuration (a Pyrex plug for this hole was also made to be used during the grinding and polishing process). While the glass was being poured into the mold during the first attempt to cast the 200-inch mirror, the intense heat caused several of the molding blocks to break loose and float to the top, ruining the mirror. The defective mirror was used to test the annealing process. After the mold was re-engineered, a second mirror was successfully cast.
  After cooling several months, the finished mirror blank was transported by rail to Pasadena, California. Once in Pasadena the mirror was transferred from the rail flat car to a specially designed semi-trailer for road transport to where it would be polished. In the optical shop in Pasadena (now the Synchrotron building at Caltech) standard telescope mirror making techniques were used to turn the flat blank into a precise concave parabolic shape, although they had to be executed on a grand scale. A special 240 in (6.1 m) 25,000 lb (11 t) mirror cell jig was constructed which could employ five different motions when the mirror was ground and polished. Over 13 years almost 10,000 lb (4.5 t) of glass was ground and polished away reducing the weight of the mirror to 14.5 short tons (13.2 t). The mirror was coated (and still is re-coated every 18–24 months) with a reflective aluminum surface using the same aluminum vacuum-deposition process invented in 1930 by Caltech physicist and astronomer John Strong.
  The Hale's 200 in (510 cm) mirror was near the technological limit of a primary mirror made of a single rigid piece of glass. Using a monolithic mirror much larger than the 5-meter Hale or 6-meter BTA-6 is prohibitively expensive due to the cost of both the mirror, and the massive structure needed to support it. A mirror beyond that size would also sag slightly under its own weight as the telescope is rotated to different positions, changing the precision shape of the surface, which must be accurate to within 2 millionths of an inch (50 nm). Modern telescopes over 9 meters use a different mirror design to solve this problem, with either a single thin flexible mirror or a cluster of smaller segmented mirrors, whose shape is continuously adjusted by a computer-controlled active optics system using actuators built into the mirror support cell.
caption: Entrance door to 200 inch Hale telescope dome
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