MWO Library
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The library has staff and visitor offices and some recreational facilities. It is also used for small meetings and seminars. You may have noticed its rather odd construction. Because important charts and drawings are stored here, the building is built to withstand both forest fires and earthquakes.
Originally, this building housed the spectroscopic laboratory. When images of the Sun's spectrum were made at Mount Wilson, very few of the hundreds of absorption lines were linked with to particular elements and molecules. Therefore, laboratories such as this one set up experiments using chemical furnaces in an attempt to record atomic absorption lines and identify them in the solar spectrum.
The results originating from this facility were critical in confirming several hypotheses concerning the Sun's atmosphere: first, that sunspots were cooler than the surrounding photosphere; second, that splitting of spectral features occurred due to the presence of magnetic fields.
The Tour continues down the ridge to the 24 Inch Telescope.
Topics
Life at the Observatory
Spectroscopy Lab
Control Panel
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