Samuel Oschin telescope

The Samuel Oschin telescope is a 48-inch (1.22m) Schmidt camera at the Palomar Observatory in northern San Diego County, California. The instrument is strictly a camera; there is no provision for an eyepiece to look through it. It originally used large 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. The camera has been converted to use a CCD imager. This is a mosaic of 112 CCDs covering the whole (4 degree by 4 degree) field of view of the camera, the largest CCD mosaic used in an astronomical camera at this time.