The Hale Telescope is one of the best known scientific instruments in the world. Located on Mount Palomar in southern California, it has been in operation since 1948. More information about the telescope is available on the following WebSites:
For some additional information about this Hale Telescope Addon, see
V1 and V2 of the Hale Telescope Addons are for Celestia v1.5.0 or later. V3 of the Hale Telescope Addons is optimized for Celestia v1.6.0 or later. However, only a few things don't work with Celestia v1.5.1.
Celestia is a free 3D astronomical visualization program. More information about Celestia is available at https://celestiaproject.space/celestia/.
Celestia v1.6.1 for Windows, MacOS X and Linux is available at https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21302
These Hale Telescope Addons provide a CMOD model of the 200" Hale Telescope and its dome on a digital elevation model of Palomar Mountain. V1 tracks the object specified in the Addon's SSC catalog file. V2 adds typed commands to control the simulated telescope. V3 adds 3D control desks with selectable buttons and switches.
The field of view image in the Hale Telescope Addons represents what can be seen by the Palomar Large Format Camera, which is described at https://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/observer/200inchResources/lfcspecs.html
If you restore any one of these Zip files into Celestia's Extras directory, it should recreate all of the directories and files necessary for it to work with Celestia v1.5.0 or later.
The included HTML (Web) files contain Cel:// URLs which will take you to viewpoints around the telescope.
The dome is a separate model. It can be eliminated so you can watch the telescope turn.
For more information about these Addons, be sure to read their "readme" files.
Some comments about the development of v3 are available at https://celestiaguru.blogspot.com/
200" Dome at sunset (27Dec06) |
200" Hale Telescope (preliminary; 23Dec06) |
200" Hale Telescope in dome (31Dec06) |
Hale telescope: holey coude (25Aug07) |
Hale telescope: more holes (3Sep07) |
Hale telescope: declination holes (11Sep07) |
Missing 3rd Coudé flat (16Sep07) |
Light paths & mirrors (9Oct07) |
Hale telescope: dome interior (revised 11Dec07) |
Hale in Motion A 1:25 min:sec YouTube video showing the model of the telescope and one of its light paths. (20Oct07) |
Hale Telescope at Sunset (29Nov07) |
Hale Telescope: laser (29Nov07) |
The images below show development of features for v3 of the Addon | ||
Start at Hale Telescope control desk (30Dec07) |
Hale Telescope control desk, v0.03 (15jan08) Emulates real telescope controls |
Hale Telescope demo desk, v0.02 (20jan08) Controls Addon demonstrations |
Hale Telescope, inside the dome, v0.02 (27jan08) |
Hale Telescope, inside the dome, v0.03 (14Mar08) |
Laser Launch Telescope (revised: 26May08) |
These models of the telescope and its dome are incomplete. Many details have been omitted and some aren't quite right. The model of the mountaintop is relatively low resolution and doesn't exactly follow the topographic contours. It is hoped that a future version of this Addon will provide some improvements.
The SSC catalogs were created for Celestia v1.5.0. They cannot work with earlier versions of Celestia and may need to be modified for use with later versions.
The telescope and dome turn continuously despite the time of day. Maybe in a future version they'll turn only when the target is above the horizon during the night.
Surface textures of Neptune and Uranus were derived from adaptive optics pictures taken by, and are used with the permission of, Don Banfield (Cornell). Credits: Don Banfield (Cornell), PHARO Team (Cornell), PALAO Team (JPL).
The models included in this Addon were created using Anim8or, a free 3D design program written by Steve Glanville. Visit https://www.anim8or.com/ for more information.
The designs of the telescope models were based on
Additional information used in v2 and v3 of this Addon was found in the following:
The "7.5 minute" DEM and topographic maps that this Addon uses were originally created by the USGS. DEM models were obtained from https://geogdata.csun.edu/ Topographic maps were obtained from https://archive.casil.ucdavis.edu/
Selden Ball translated them into Celestia's CMOD format using 3DEM ( https://www.visualizationsoftware.com/3dem.html) and a home-grown Fortran program. ImageMagick and netpbm were used to crop, scale and translate the topo map into JPEG format. ImageMagick and netpbm are freely available at https://www.imagemagick.org/ and https://netpbm.sourceforge.net/
These Addons for Celestia were created by Selden Ball and are copyright © December, 2006, © December, 2007, and © December, 2008. All rights reserved.
These Addons may be freely redistributed for educational purposes. They may not be used for any commercial benefit without explicit written permission from the author.
Please send any questions, comments or corrections to seb1@cornell.edu
If you don't tell me that something's missing, unclear or wrong, I can't improve it.