Before the early film impresarios set up shop here for the constant sunshine - a full decade, in fact, before Carl Laemmle’s 230-acre chicken ranch became Universal City - someone had already noticed the light in Los Angeles. That someone was George Ellery Hale, an astronomer from back East who had developed a way to photograph the sun. Hale studied the sun daily, so he needed good light. And in 1904 he built a big version of his spectroheliograph atop Mount Wilson, about 10 miles northeast of Los Angeles, to take advantage of the calm air and the 300 cloudless days the area gets each year. The site grew, with four more telescopes added over the next decade and a half, the last of which was the Hooker 100-inch - then the largest in the world, and the instrument with which Edwin Hubble discovered (or proved, depending on whom you talk to) that the... More >>>