The Samuel Oschin Telescope

Named after the late Los Angeles area business leader and philanthropist Samuel Oschin, this telescope is where the historical Palomar Observatory Sky Surveys were done, and where the Palomar-Quest survey is being conducted now.

The telescope is of the wide-field Schmidt camera design type, with the primary mirror diameter of 48 inches (thus it was formerly known as the "Palomar 48-inch Schmidt"). This gives it a wide field of view, around 9 degrees in diameter, which is about 18 times wider than the apparent size of the full moon.

Telescopes of this type are really good for wide-field surveying of the sky, from which one could select various interesting objects to follow up with the larger telescopes, such as the Palomar Hale 200-inch, the Keck 10-meter telescopes, or the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Such premier instruments are good to look deep, but over a much narrower field of view. For example, the area typically covered by the HST images is about 10,000 times smaller than the area covered by the Big Picture.

Thus, astronomers often use wide-area sky surveys like Palomar-Quest in combination with deeper observations of selected targets using larger telescopes, or observations on other wavelengths, such as radio, infra-red, x-ray, etc.

You can learn more about the Samuel Oschin Telescope here.