EMAIL: ethelm@bigfoot.com NAME: Ian & Ethel MacKay TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Hale Telescope at Palomar COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: http://www.hermes.net.au/artwerx RENDERER USED: Povray 3.01 TOOLS USED: Neopaint RENDER TIME: 1 hour 24 minutes 41 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The 200 inch Hale Telescope at Mt.Palomar is one of the great engineering achievements of the 20th Century, conceived in 1928 and operational in 1949. It is 500 tons of precision. The mirror took 10 years to grind. For nearly 50 years it was the largest astronomical telescope in the world. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I have never been to Palomar. When I decided on this subject I thought that the public library would have all the data I needed. Not so. A 1964 copy of a "Life Nature Library" book was all I could find. So I started with a cutaway drawing till something better turned up. Ethel found a photo of the telescope on The Internet at Caltech's site which had been taken with a fisheye lens and I worked from that. The detail is probably not very accurate. Essentially an exercise in CSG. The image is distorted by the fairly wide camera angle used. Quite a bit of guesswork is involved also. The inside of the Dome is a simple grid made in a basic version of Neopaint and mapped onto a sphere in Povray.