The C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California. It was named after astronomer C. Donald Shane in 1978, who led the effort to acquire the necessary funds from the California Legislature, and who then oversaw the telescope's construction. It is the largest and most powerful telescope at the Lick Observatory, and was the second-largest telescope in the world when it was commissioned in 1959.
The Shane's mirror started as a 10,000-pound Corning Labs glass test blank for the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch (5-m) Hale telescope (in north San Diego County, California), but was sold below cost ($50,000 USD) by Caltech to the Lick Observatory. It was then transported to Mount Hamilton where the blank was ground and polished by the observatory.
Read more about C. Donald Shane Telescope: Features, History, Contemporaries On Commissioning
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—Griffin Jay, Maxwell Shane (1905–1983)
“The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)