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Samuel Oschin Telescope

United States of America

Samuel Oschin Telescope

The Samuel Oschin telescope (), also called the Oschin Schmidt, is a 48-inch-aperture (1.22 m) Schmidt camera at the Palomar Observatory in northern San Diego County, California, United States. It consists of a 49.75-inch (1.264 m) Schmidt corrector plate and a 72-inch (1.8 m) (f/2.5) mirror. The in

strument is strictly a camera; there is no provision for an eyepiece to look through it. It originally used 10-inch (25 cm) and 14-inch (36 cm) glass photographic plates. Since the focal plane is curved, these plates had to be preformed in a special jig before being loaded into the camera. Construction on the Schmidt telescope began in 1939 and it was completed in 1948. It was named the Samuel Oschin telescope in 1986. Before that it was just called the 48-inch (1.2 m) Schmidt. In the mid-1980s, the corrector plate was replaced using glass with less chromatic aberration, producing higher quality images over a broader spectrum. Between 2000 and 2001, it was converted to use a CCD imager. The corrector plate was recently replaced using glass that is transparent to a wider range of wavelengths. The telescope was originally hand-guided through one of two 10-inch-aperture (0.25 m) refracting...

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