Growing up I had read all about this observatory in many books. It is a famous large telescope and for a while it was the largest telescope in the world.

So it felt wonderful to finally come and visit but....

One of the challenging things about visiting an observatory is that they always put them on the top of a mountain. That's of course for good reason. But it does make the drive a bit harrowing. This was a pretty good drive but a long way up!

It was only a partial visit. I could walk around the grounds and see some things, get some pictures. But, they have ticketed tours of the actual observatory and telescope and I got there too late. The tickets were sold out. So I never got to get into the dome with the telescope.

The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope

Almost a half-century after is completion, the 200-inch Palomar telescope remains an unparalleled combination of vast scale and microscope detail. As huge as the Pantheon of Rome and as heavy as the Statue of Liberty, this magnificent instrument is so precisely built that its seventeen-foot mirror was hand-polished to a tolerance of 2/1,000,000 of an inch. The telescope's construction drove some to the brink of madness, made others fearful that mortals might glimpse heaven, and transfixed an entire nation. Ronald Florence weaves into his account of the creation of "the perfect machine" a stirring chronicle of the birth of Big Science and a poignant rendering of an America mired in the depression yet reaching for the stars.