Mount Palomar

“Those spectacles have more glass in them than the telescope at Mount Palomar.”

A few taps on the screen, and the Zwicky Transient Facility, a robotic telescope on Mount Palomar, was reprogrammed to start the hunt.

At that time the biggest successful telescope was the 200-inch Hale telescope on top of Mount Palomar near San Diego.

Computational astrophysicist Peter Nugent of the University of California in Berkeley is taking a different tack: His graduate students will trawl through archival data from a survey begun in 2009 on the venerable 5.1-meter telescope on Mount Palomar in California to see whether it happened to spot the planet. 

Weaver and Loomis put the finishing touches on the lobbying effort by persuading Fosdick that the cyclotron would stand as a bookend with the foundation’s other great scientific investment: the 200-inch Hale telescope planned for Mount Palomar in Southern California, cementing the Rockefeller Foundation’s stature as the world’s preeminent supporter of Big Science.