The First 50 Years at Palomar : 1949 – 1999

PROLOGUE In 1999 we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the initial bringing into operation of the Palomar 200-inch Hale telescope. When this telescope was dedicated, it opened up a much larger and clearer window on the universe than any telescope that had gone before. Because the Hale telescope has played such an important role in twentieth century astrophysics, we decided to invite one or two of the astronomers most familiar with what has been achieved at Palomar to give a scientific commentary on the work that has been done there in the first fifty years. The first article of this kind which follows is by Allan Sandage, who has been an active member of the staff of what was originally the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, and later the Carnegie Observatories for the whole of these fifty years. The article is devoted to the topics which covered the original goals for the Palomar telescope, namely observational cosmology and the study of galaxies, together with discoveries that were not anticipated, but were first made at Palomar and which played a leading role in the development of high energy astrophysics. The Palomar work first showed how optical astronomy would be the key to our understanding of observations made in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly at radio wavelengths and at X-ray energies. —Geoffrey Burbidge, Editor