| Organization | Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | Ventana Wilderness | ||
| Coordinates | 36°18′20″N121°34′00″W / 36.30556°N 121.56667°W | ||
| Altitude | 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) | ||
| Website | www | ||
| Telescopes | |||
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  Location of Oliver Observing Station | |||
The Oliver Observing Station is an independent professional astronomical observatory named after Barnard M. Oliver. It is owned and operated by The Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA).
The observatory is in the Los Padres National Forest, about 20 miles east and south of Carmel Valley, California, a few miles from the Tassajara monastery. The site was first publicized by Walker (1970) [1] and more fully characterized by Hutter et al. (1997) [2] as having sub-arcsecond astronomical seeing and a high number of photometric-quality nights per year. It is well protected from light pollution to the south by the Ventana Wilderness inside the Los Padres National Forest and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. The northern direction is impacted by light from the Monterey-Salinas complex and San Jose. The east is moderately dark, due to the highly agriculturally-productive Salinas Valley but is slowly becoming more light polluted, especially in the area of Soledad.[ citation needed ]
The primary telescope is the 36 inch Cassegrain reflector; the first telescope built by Dr. Frank Melsheimer (now DFM Engineering). The mirror was the mirror from Project Stratoscope, the precursor experiment to the Hubble Space Telescope. [3]
Instrumentation includes a dual-ported Cassegrain spectrograph, echelle spectrographs, and direct cameras used for imaging and precision photometry and polarimetry.
Subaru Telescope is the 8.2-metre (320 in) telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii. It is named after the open star cluster known in English as the Pleiades. It had the largest monolithic primary mirror in the world from its commissioning until the Large Binocular Telescope opened in 2005.
The Lick Observatory is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by the University of California. It is on the summit of Mount Hamilton, in the Diablo Range just east of San Jose, California, United States. The observatory is managed by the University of California Observatories, with headquarters on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, where its scientific staff moved in the mid-1960s. It is named after James Lick.
The Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO) is an astronomical observatory in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The MWO is located on Mount Wilson, a 5,710-foot (1,740-meter) peak in the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles.
The Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, located on Observatory Hill, in Saanich, British Columbia, was completed in 1918 by the Canadian government. The Dominion architect responsible for the building was Edgar Lewis Horwood. The main instrument is the 72-inch-aperture (1.83 m) Plaskett telescope, proposed and designed by John S. Plaskett in 1910 with the support of the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research.
The William Herschel Telescope (WHT) is a 4.20-metre (165 in) optical/near-infrared reflecting telescope located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain. The telescope, which is named after William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus, is part of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes. It is funded by research councils from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain.
The Isaac Newton Telescope or INT is a 2.54 m (100 in) optical telescope run by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands since 1984.
The Hale Telescope is a 200-inch (5.1 m), f/3.3 reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, US, named after astronomer George Ellery Hale. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, he orchestrated the planning, design, and construction of the observatory, but with the project ending up taking 20 years he did not live to see its commissioning. The Hale was groundbreaking for its time, with double the diameter of the second-largest telescope, and pioneered many new technologies in telescope mount design and in the design and fabrication of its large aluminum coated "honeycomb" low thermal expansion Pyrex mirror. It was completed in 1949 and is still in active use.
La Silla Observatory is an astronomical observatory in Chile with three telescopes built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Several other telescopes are located at the site and are partly maintained by ESO. The observatory is one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and was the first in Chile to be used by ESO.
The Vainu Bappu Observatory is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. It is located at Kavalur in the Javadi Hills, near Vaniyambadi in Tirupathur district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is 200 km south-west of Chennai and 175 km south-east of Bangalore.
Mount Laguna Observatory (MLO) is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by San Diego State University (SDSU). The telescope was operated in partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) until 2000. MLO is located approximately 75 kilometers (47 mi) east of downtown San Diego, California (USA) on the eastern edge of the Cleveland National Forest in the Laguna Mountains on the SDSU Astronomy Campus near the hamlet of Mount Laguna. MLO was dedicated on June 19, 1968, seven years after SDSU's Department of Astronomy became an independent academic department of SDSU's College of Sciences. The dedication took place during the 1968 summer meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Currently SDSU is working with University of Kansas (KU), and UNC Chapel Hill on various projects. MLO also engages with the public through a series of scientific outreach efforts such as the summer visitors program (SVP). SVP's take place on select dates throughout the summer months and include scientific demonstrations in the museum / gift shop, an introductory lecture on astronomy, and a stargazing session using a myriad of telescopes such as the 0.52 m Reginald Buller 21-inch Visitors' Telescope. The SVP is predominantly run by graduate students within the SDSU Astronomy Master's program.
Mount Lemmon Observatory (MLO), also known as the Mount Lemmon Infrared Observatory, is an astronomical observatory located on Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains approximately 28 kilometers (17 mi) northeast of Tucson, Arizona (US). The site in the Coronado National Forest is used with special permission from the U.S. Forest Service by the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, and contains a number of independently managed telescopes.
The C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.05-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California. It was named after astronomer C. Donald Shane in 1978, who led the effort to acquire the necessary funds from the California Legislature, and who then oversaw the telescope's construction. It is the largest and most powerful telescope at the Lick Observatory, and was the second-largest optical telescope in the world when it was commissioned in 1959.
An astronomical interferometer or telescope array is a set of separate telescopes, mirror segments, or radio telescope antennas that work together as a single telescope to provide higher resolution images of astronomical objects such as stars, nebulas and galaxies by means of interferometry. The advantage of this technique is that it can theoretically produce images with the angular resolution of a huge telescope with an aperture equal to the separation, called baseline, between the component telescopes. The main drawback is that it does not collect as much light as the complete instrument's mirror. Thus it is mainly useful for fine resolution of more luminous astronomical objects, such as close binary stars. Another drawback is that the maximum angular size of a detectable emission source is limited by the minimum gap between detectors in the collector array.
The Nasmyth telescope, also called Nasmyth–Cassegrain or Cassegrain–Nasmyth, is a reflecting telescope developed by the Scottish inventor James Nasmyth. It is a modified form of a Cassegrain telescope, with light reflected sideways to an eyepiece.
The Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA) is an independent, non-profit, professional astronomical observatory dedicated to astronomical education and research, near Monterey, California. It was the first private professional observatory in the United States to open in the 20th century.
Nicholas Ulrich Mayall was an American observational astronomer. After obtaining his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, Mayall worked at the Lick Observatory, where he remained from 1934 to 1960, except for a brief period at MIT's Radiation Laboratory during World War II.
The Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO) is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by the University of Wyoming. It is located on Jelm Mountain, 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Laramie, Wyoming, U.S. It was founded in 1975, and observations began at the site in 1977. Recent research performed at WIRO includes searching for runaway stars, monitoring short-term variations in blazars, and monitoring massive binary stars.
Craig Chester is an American astronomer who co-founded the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA) in the Los Padres National Forest in California along with five other astronomy students from Case Western Reserve University and three non-astronomers. Chester suggested that the Star of Bethlehem was a real historical event, and that Jupiter's "stationary point" during apparent retrograde motion could explain the Star's "stopping" over Bethlehem, He wrote an article which helped inspire The Star of Bethlehem documentary. Chester developed software for satellite communications and ground equipment for the United States military. He was president of MIRA in 2016.
The Chews Ridge Lookout is located at the northern end of the Santa Lucia Range of the Los Padres National Forest, about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Monterey, California and approximately 30 miles (48 km) west of Highway 101. The current tower was built in 1929 and staffed until around 1990. A volunteer organization began recruiting individuals to staff the tower in 2019. The ridge and tower were named for homesteaders Constantine and Nellie Chew, who patented 315 acres (127 ha) on the ridge in the late 19th century.
The Observatorio Manuel Foster, or Manuel Foster Observatory, is an astronomical observatory constructed on Cerro San Cristóbal near Santiago, Chile in 1903. This site was originally known as the D. O. Mills Observatory after the philanthropist Darius Ogden Mills. It was built as an offshoot of the Lick Observatory to observe stars in the southern hemisphere, and, under the direction of the American astronomer W. W. Campbell, was used in an extensive project to determine the apex of the Sun's motion through space.
