| What makes it historical? |
George Ellery Hale founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904 after a Harvard expedition had failed due to bad weather, low income, and destructive campers. He had created a 40-inch telescope—the largest in the world—at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, but what he really wanted to do, study the sun, would require skies with, well, more sunshine!
Starting in 1903, Mr. Hale’s team hauled telescopic equipment by burro 60 times all the way up from Pasadena to the top of Mount Wilson, and on December 20, 1904, the observatory opened for business! The telescope transfered from Yerkes became the world’s first permanently mounted telescope, and within four years, he’d boosted that telescope count to four!
From here, Mr. Hale and his team observed sun spots and studied the spectrum of light that reached Earth. Their observations gave us a way to measure the distance of stars based on the spectrum of light that reached us! They also learned that red giants are the same temperature as sun spots, that magnetic fields occur outside of Earth, and, with the addition of a 100-inch telescope in 1919, that the Milky Way was not the center of the universe but just one galaxy among many in a huge and expanding universe! |
