New Life for the Great Melbourne Telescope

摘要

Next year is the 150th anniversary of first light for the 48-inch Great Melbourne Telescope (GMT) of the state of Victoria, Australia. For more than two decades after the English-mounted reflector was completed in 1869, the GMT was the largest equatorial telescope in the world, and it remained the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere until 1922. Its users' early achievements include the first visual observation of the spectrum of an extragalactic nebula (1870), the world's finest photographs of the Moon (1872), the first photographs of southern nebulae (1883), and the discovery of more than 50 nebulae and galaxies.