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
Large Zenith Telescope Large Zenith Telescope The Large Zenith Telescope (LZT) was a 6.0 m diameter liquid mirror telescope located in the University of British Columbia's Malcolm Knapp Research Forest, about east of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. (North of Maple Ridge.) It is one of the largest optical telescopes in the world, but still quite inexpensive. The telescope was completed in the spring of 2003. While a zenith telescope has the obvious disadvantage of not being able to look anywhere but at a small spot straight up, its simplified setup permits the use of a mirror consisting of a smoothly spinning pan filled