TITLE: Hale Telescope at Palomar

NAME: Ian & Ethel MacKay
COUNTRY: Australia

EMAIL: ethelm@bigfoot.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.hermes.net.au/artwerx

TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: hale.jpg
ZIPFILE: hale.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.01


TOOLS USED: 
    Neopaint


RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour 24 minutes 41 seconds


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 133


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The 200 inch Hale Telescope at Mt.Palomar is one of
the great engineering achievements of the 20th Century, conceived in 1928
and operational in 1949. 
It is 500 tons of precision.
The mirror took 10 years to grind.
For nearly 50 years it was the largest astronomical telescope in the world.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    I have never been to Palomar.
When I decided on this subject I thought that the public library would 
have all the data I needed. Not so.
A 1964 copy of a "Life Nature Library" book was all I could find.
So I started with a cutaway drawing till something better turned up.
Ethel found a photo of the telescope on The Internet at Caltech's site
which had been taken with a fisheye lens and I worked from that. The detail 
is probably not very accurate.
Essentially an exercise in CSG. The image is distorted by the fairly wide
camera angle used. Quite a bit of guesswork is involved also.
The inside of the Dome is a simple grid made in a basic version of Neopaint
and mapped onto a sphere in Povray.



