Post #7

For one of our assignments we get the opportunity to go to Mount Wilson and do astrophotography while also being able to to use the observatory telescope. Mount Wilson is a mountain that is located in between the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and Angeles National Forest in Los Angeles County, California. It is a very historic site, with its very first inhabitants being various tribes of the Tongva people. The Tongva are Native Americans who inhabited the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands, an area covering about 4,000 square miles. Although it initially belonged to the Tongva tribe the first recorded exploration on the mountain was by Benjamin Davis Wilson in 1852.  Wilson hoped to find a suitable wood for his casket on the mountain but was disappointed by the poor quality of trees. He built a trail, following an established Indian route, which became known as the Mount Wilson Trail.

Wilson's trail later became the early creation of the Mount Wilson Toll Road. Although Wilson never really found adequate wood, he created a trail that later many locals would hike during their pastime throughout that time. Many hikers would use fire signals to let others know that they were safe up on the mountain. In 1889 Professor William Pickering of Harvard University and Alvan P. Clark, famous lens grinder, created an experiment with 4-and-13-inch telescopes. Many university students got the opportunity to use the telescopes but, the majority of the time they wouldn't be able to see anything through them due to bad weather.

Later the small observatory was abandoned only to build a larger one. In 1891 Prof. Thaddeus S. C. Lowe combined the Pasadena & Mount Wilson Railroad with the idea of building a scenic mountain railroad to the summit of Mt. Wilson. That plan never fully went through and In 1892 Prof. Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University, planned to have two 40-inch lenses shipped from Alvan Clark & Sons in Corning, New York to the newly named Mount Harvard, directly adjacent to Mt. Wilson. The money was to be put up by Mr. Spence of the University of Southern California, but with the sudden death of Spence no word was left about the plan.

After than In 1903 George Ellery Hale visited Mt. Wilson and was impressed by the perfect conditions that it led him to set up the observatory, which would become the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory in 1904. In 1917, the 100-inch Hooker Telescope was completed and saw first light and would be the world's largest telescope until the opening of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory in 1948. Two years later, in 1919 American astronomer Edwin Hubble arrived at Mt. Wilson and, throughout the 1920s, made many astronomical discoveries using the Hooker Telescope. Later, in 1926 Albert Abraham Michelson made the most precise calculation of the speed of light at the time by measuring the round-trip travel time of light between Mount Wilson and Mount San Antonio 22 miles away.