Text and captions from Jack Eastman:  

What happened after this terrific All-Class reunion, was an all-day expedition to the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory..

Marilyn Hancock, one of my classmates from the class of 1957, had e-mailed me about the possibility of a trip up to Mt. Wilson sometime during the big reunion. I e-mailed Carla Johns, and we got everybody more or less connected. 

Carla was able to get the Monday after the reunion weekend off and agreed to host our bunch at Mt. Wilson. Marilyn agreed to pick me up at the hotel and pick up a couple others, Ernie Woods and Judy Cleland. We met up with Carla at the historic Bob's Big Boy hamburger joint in Burbank, had lunch and headed out. 

I didn't recognize much, but we were heading up from Burbank, not the route from Pasadena that I was used to. It still seemed like we were lost, we should have at least seen evidence of JPL, as the route, Highway 2, Angeles Crest, starts out only a mile or two from JPL. We turned down a tiny neighborhood street for several blocks which turned out to be Big Tujunga Canyon road. The short of it was from here the trip was probably three times as long as Angeles Crest. 

Angeles Crest was still closed all the way from La Canada to the turnoff to Mt. Wilson due to heavy damage from that huge fire last Fall. The countryside was truly devastated, looking like the surface of the moon. It reminded me of Mt. St. Helens several years after it blew it's top, nothing but bare ground. This was the scene most of the way to the observatory. 

We finally arrived at Mt. Wilson. Carla's plan was first, an in depth visit at the 60-inch reflector, then a walk around the grounds, and the grand finale, the 100-inch.

We went in the dome, and among other things, Carla and Todd dragged much food, munchies, and all to restock the pantry in the dome. We were able to look over the 60" in detail, go into the basement (Coude' Room, or maybe more properly the Clock Room) where the large gears are that move the telescope East and West (Hour Angle) could be seen. It sure seemed empty from my visits of a half century or so ago. The large weight-driven clock for tracking was gone, much of the mechanism for clamping and unclamping the drive gear was also gone, as was the "microscope" for reading the hour circle from the control desk upstairs. 

After thoroughly going through the 60", we hiked down to the "monastery", the sleeping quarters for the visiting astronomers. This was a first for me, I'd never been past the shop/library/laboratory/pool hall building a bit further up the road. Carla didn't have the keys to that one; it would have been interesting to poke around in there and see if that really nice pool table was still there. I think every major observatory has a first class pool table! 

Lick and Palomar sure do.

On the way down there we stopped at some large concrete piers, one of which had a bronze plaque identifying it as where Michelson set up his measurement equipment to measure the velocity of light between Mt. Wilson and a distant mountain near Mt. Baldy in 1926. 

On the way, now to the dome of the 100", we stopped at the little "cook shack" at the end of the causeway to the 100". Carla explained that this little kitchen was placed out away from the telescopes because Hale, the first Director, was afraid of someone starting a fire in the dome if the kitchens were in the domes. 

Corner of the old Monastery (sleeping quarters)
(Picture by Carla Johns)
 

Here, the mirror end of the telescope looks much like the nose of a large steam locomotive. Through a vent, one can look at the actual 9,000 pound piece of glass, emerald green with numerous bubbles, reminds me of St. Paddy's day - great quantity of green beer. The glass had to be cast in three melts which gave rise to all the bubbles. George W. Ritchey, the optician who was responsible for the grinding and polishing, and George Ellery Hale, the Director, rejected the first blank. St. Gobain tried again. http://www.mtwilson.edu/vir/100/mirror/

After more trepidation and deliberation it was finally decided to use the first piece of glass after all. Roughly 4½ tons of French wine bottle glass was ground and polished to a final accuracy of about a millionth of an inch to become the world's largest-ever telescope. 

Think of all those French wine bottles that gave their lives for the world's biggest telescope. 

The 100" saw first light in 1917. The first view, Jupiter, was very disappointing, a really terrible image. The telescope a failure? Hale and a couple of others returned in the wee hours of the morning and tried again. Perfection! It seems the dome had been open all day and the mirror was distorted by the warmth of the day, but after settling most of the night, the distortions disappeared, the telescope was a success. 

We then went up on the main floor where the control desk is located. Carla opened the dome and then gave us a ride. One is absolutely convinced that the telescope is turning about a vertical axis, clearly not the case, but the rotation of this 500-ton dome is so smooth and quiet that there is no sensation of motion. Proof that this is an illusion? look outside and notice the landscape is also majestically moving by. Now it was downstairs to another control room and into the coude' focus station, where we could see the huge slewing and driving gears, the latter being a 1440-tooth worm, 17 feet in diameter. Like the 60, the weight-driven clock drive is disconnected and all the movement of the telescope is through the big worm gear by computer control.

"Danger, Laser" signs are all over the place, part of the laser-induced artificial guide star for their advanced adaptive optics system, which measures the turbulence of the atmosphere and corrects for it, allowing a much sharper image than the telescope alone. Like the 60", the 100" is supported by mercury floats at both ends of the polar axis, allowing effortless moving of the 87-ton mass. The original driving clock was said to produce about 1/100th horsepower. 

Down in the bowels of the building we found the parking places for the upper cage sections of the telescope, the coude' mirror which sends the light to powerful spectrographs in the basement, the Cassegrain mirror, which is on the telescope and the empty place for the Newtonian focus. Empty, because this setup was given to the Smithsonian, no doubt with Edwin Hubble's favorite chair. It was a true piece of history to see the boxes, both here and at the 60" with names such as Baade, Zwicky, Humason, Adams, Pease, Babcock, Nicholson, and Hubble, the true pioneers of discovery that put Mt. Wilson forever on the map and made major advances in our knowledge of our universe. 

 View of most of the historic 100-inch Hooker telescope
(Picture by Judy Cleland Bergen) 
 

Many heartfelt thanks to our wonderful hosts, Carla and Todd Johns of the Mt. Wilson Observatory association