george ellery hale

I was doing a little research into the history of telescopes, and it was about a century ago that they finally realized how much more potential light-gathering power reflecting telescopes had as compared to the older refracting telescopes. On Mt. Wilson in California, astronomer George Ellery Hale and optician George Willis Ritchey (back then everybody was named George -- look it up!) were embarking on a program to build large reflecting telescopes as the wave-of-the-future of Astronomy. But even before this telescope was operational, Hale and Ritchey were thinking of bigger and bigger…