Description

The Samuel Oschin telescope, also called the Oschin Schmidt, is a 48-inch-aperture (1.22 m) Schmidt camera at the Palomar Observatory in northern San Diego County, California, United States. It consists of a 49.75-inch (1.264 m) Schmidt corrector plate and a 72-inch (1.8 m) (f/2.5) mirror. The instrument is strictly a camera; there is no provision for an eyepiece to look through it. It originally used 10-inch (25 cm) and 14-inch (36 cm) glass photographic plates. Since the focal plane is curved, these plates had to be preformed in a special jig before being loaded into the camera.