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Mount Wilson Observatory
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===60-foot Solar Tower=== The {{convert|60|ft|m|adj=on}} Solar Tower soon built on the work started at the Snow telescope. At its completion in 1908, the vertical tower design of the 60-foot focal length solar telescope allowed much higher resolution of the solar image and spectrum than the Snow telescope could achieve. The higher resolution came from situating the optics higher above the ground, thereby avoiding the distortion caused by the heating of the ground by the Sun. On June 25, 1908, Hale would record [[Zeeman splitting]] in the spectrum of a sunspot, showing for the first time that magnetic fields existed somewhere besides the Earth. A later discovery was of the reversed polarity in sunspots of the new solar cycle of 1912. The success of the 60-foot Tower prompted Hale to pursue yet another, taller tower telescope. In the 1960s, Robert Leighton discovered the Sun had a 5-minute oscillation and the field of helioseismology was born.<ref name="mtwilson.edu"/><ref>{{cite web |last1=Pinkerton |first1=Stephen |last2=Chen |first2=Casey |title=History of the 60 Foot Solar Tower |url=http://physics1.usc.edu/solar/history.html |publisher=[[University of Southern California]] |access-date=21 September 2020}}</ref> The 60-foot Tower is operated by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at [[University of Southern California]].
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