100- & 60-inch Telescope Hyper Public Ticket Night: Saturday, AUG 19, 2023 - CANCELED FOR WEATHER

Mount Wilson's 100- & 60-inch Telescope Hyper Public Ticket Nights make the remarkable experience of telescope viewing available to individuals.  This incredible observing experience has been made even more special, as our Hyper Nights enable visitors to use BOTH telescopes on the same night - the two largest telescopes in the world dedicated exclusively to the public.

60-inch Telescope: This historic telescope saw first light in 1908 and set in motion a quest for ever-larger reflecting telescopes that continues today. During the WWI years, the American astronomer Harlow Shapley used the telescope to show that the Sun was located well away from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, thus extending the Copernican Revolution by demonstrating that the Sun has no special place in the Universe.

100-inch Telescope: After seeing first light in 1917, the telescope would be the world's largest until 1949 when the Palomar 200-inch came on line. The world-heritage class telescope was famously used by Edwin Hubble during the early 1920s to show that the Universe is vast in size compared with the then prevailing view. Hubble followed up this revolutionary discovery by quantifying the expansion of the Universe, thereby launching modern cosmology. Other than Galileo's first instruments, no other telescope has had a similar impact on human understanding of our place in the Universe.

Come enjoy an incredible night of astronomy on the telescopes that forever changed our understanding of the scale and nature of our Universe and launched a revolution in astronomy that continues through today!