Welcome to the Mount Wilson Virtual Tour! This tour is designed to give the visitor a feel for the observatory grounds and to present some of the history and heritage of Mount Wilson Observatory. One advantage of this tour over the one which is available on-site is that the virtual tourist is welcome to areas usually closed to the the public. For example, the 60-inch telescope is inaccessible to visitors. But on this tour, we'll travel to all of the domes on the mountain.

Getting around the Tour

Virtual tourists can move among the locations on the mountain in one of several ways. First, the virtual tour itself progresses from location to location in order, and there will be links at the bottom of each page. For tourists with graphical browsers, you can move to the previous or next point in the tour using the arrow buttons:

One can also use the observatory map to move around. Clicking on the map moves you to the corresponding point of the tour:

Finally, there is a FORM which allows the tourist to select where to travel next:

In addition there are controls for moving outside of the virtual tour:

The left (dome) button will return you to the Mount Wilson Home Page, the middle (magnifying glass) button will let you search the archive for particular words or phrases, and the right (question mark) button will send you to a page which has explanatory material.

Visitors using WWW browsers that support frames will find these control panels located within a panel at the lower-left of the display. Other browsers will find the control panel at the bottom of the main page for each location on the tour.