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
History of the telescope These and other telescopes of this size had to have provisions to allow for the removal of their main mirrors for re-silvering every few months. John Donavan Strong, a young physicist at the California Institute of Technology, developed a technique for coating a mirror with a much longer lasting aluminum coating using thermal vacuum evaporation. In 1932, he became the first person to "aluminize" a mirror; three years later the and telescopes became the first large astronomical telescopes to have their mirrors aluminized. 1948 saw the completion of the Hale reflector at Mount Palomar which was the largest telescope in