Hale Telescope mirror.. It was completed in 1948 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 until the Russian BTA-6 was built in 1976, and the second largest until the construction of the Keck Observatory Keck 1 in 1993. Hale supervised the building of the telescopes at the Mount Wilson Observatory with grants from the Carnegie Institution of Washington: the telescope in 1908 and the telescope in 1917. These telescopes were very successful, leading to the rapid advance in understanding
Optical telescope mirror), and even external to the telescope all together (such as the Nasmyth and coudé focus). A new era of telescope making was inaugurated by the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT), with a mirror composed of six segments synthesizing a mirror of 4.5 meters diameter. This has now been replaced by a single 6.5 m mirror. Its example was followed by the Keck telescopes with 10 m segmented mirrors. The largest current ground-based telescopes have a primary mirror of between 6 and 11 meters in diameter. In this generation of telescopes, the mirror is usually very thin, and is kept in