Bernhard Schmidt and the Schmidt Telescope for Mapping the Sky

Abstract Bernhard Voldemar Schmidt (1879-1935) was born in Estonia. He ran an optical workshop in Mittweida, Saxonia, between 1901 and 1927. Astronomers appreciated the quality of his telescopes. Starting in 1925, working freelance in Hamburg Observatory, he developed a short focal length optical system with a large field of view. He succeeded in inventing the “Schmidt Telescope” in 1930, which allows the imaging a large field of the sky without any distortions. Shortly after Schmidt’s death, the director of the observatory published details on the invention and production of the Schmidt Telescope. After World War II, Schmidt telescopes have been widely used. The first large Schmidt telescope was built in 1948, the “Big Schmidt” (126 cm), Mount Palomar, USA. Schmidt telescopes are also important tools for cosmology. The result of the Palomar Observatory Sky Surveys (1949-1958, 1985-1999) is a data base of about 20 million galaxies and over 100 million stars, supplemented in 1971 by the ESO Schmidt for the southern sky. Also high resolution spectrometers can be fitted to the Schmidt telescope. The 80 cm Schmidt telescope of Hamburg Observatory, planned since 1936, finished 1955, is on Calar Alto, Spain, since 1975. Combined with two objective prisms, it was used for a Quasar survey project.