About the observatories

Palomar Observatory is located on Palomar Mountain in San Diego County, California. The gem of this observatory is the 200-hundred inch telescope. Visitors to the observatory can tour the telescope dome and ascend the long staircase to see the giant glass lens.

Griffith Observatory is located just north of downtown Los Angeles, California. It is a public observatory. Since its opening in 1935, over 7 million people have taken a peek at the night sky through the 12-inch telescope on sight, making this instrument the telescope used by the largest number of people of any other telescope.

Mount Wilson Observatory is located near Los Angeles, California, northeast of Pasadena. The observatory hosts multiple optical telescopes (in domes) and two solar telescopes. The first molecule detected in the interstellar medium was found in data from one of Mount Wilson Observatory’s telescopes.

Green Bank Observatory is located in the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia. It is home of the largest movable object on land, the 17-million-pound, taller-than-the-Statue-of-Liberty Green Bank Telescope (GBT). It is also located in the National Radio Quiet Zone. There is no cell phone service or microwave ovens allowed near the observatory to protect its sensitive instruments from radio frequency interferience. Green Bank Observatory is a former site of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and it became independent in 2016.

ALMA Observatory The Observatory Sticker Series heads to South America for its fifth installment. ALMA Observatory, which consists of 66 radio antennas making up one big telescope array, is in the Atacama Desert on the Chajnantor Plateau in northern Chile. ALMA, or the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, can be arranged differently to probe different spatial scales when observing the invisible universe; two large yellow transporters can move the antennas around to change their configuration.