Samuel Oschin telescope

The Samuel Oschin telescope (ˈɔːʃɪn), also called the Oschin Schmidt, is a Schmidt camera at the Palomar Observatory in northern San Diego County, California. It consists of a 49.75-inch Schmidt corrector plate and a 72-inch (f/2.5) mirror. The instrument is strictly a camera; there is no provision for an eyepiece to look through it. It originally used 10- and 14-inch 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 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 refracting telescopes mounted on either side. The camera is now fully automated and remote-controlled. The data collected are transmitted over the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN). It is programmed and operated primarily from Pasadena, California, with no operator on site, except to open and close the observatory dome. The first CCD camera installed was the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) camera, which had three separate 4k×4k sensors arranged in a north–south line with substantial (1°) gaps between them. The total field of view was 3.75 square degrees. From 2003 to 2007, it was the home of the Quasar Equatorial Survey Team camera. This consisted of 112 CCDs, each 2400×600 pixels (161 megapixels total), arranged in four columns of 28 (with gaps between), the largest CCD mosaic used in an astronomical camera at the time. The next camera installed (in 2009) was a 12,288 by 8,192 pixel mosaic (100 megapixel) originally built for the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope.