Hale expected the optical work to take four years to complete, and the mounting and dome one year.

The collection contains raw and edited film footage, some duplicated on video tape or transferred to DVD, of the construction and operation of the Palomar Observatory. Hale's greatest project, however, was construction of the 200" telescope on Mount Palomar which, unfortunately, he did not see completed before his death. But why stop when there was so much more to see, when fantastic views of distant galaxies could be within reach?

The other was a 100-inch (2.54 meters) telescope that was completed in 1917. When Halley’s comet returns to our quarter of the universe this year, the great 200-inch Hale Telescope, perched high on Palomar Mountain in California, will follow it across the sky. In addition, science programs using the 48-inch Schmidt telescope—later the Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope—began a year before the Hale Telescope went into service. That would give him time to raise the funds for the rest of the telescope and building, over $500,000, while Hooker’s mirror was being shaped. American astronomer George Ellery Hale was supposed to be retired. An image of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, the first official photograph was taken with the 48- inch Schmidt Telescope on September 24, 1948. By 1928, Palomar had a $6 million grant ($83.5 million in 2014 dollars) in place to construct a 200-inch (5 m) telescope. There were other problems to overcome, though. A 100" telescope was placed on Mount Wilson in 1917 with money from Los Angeles hardware tycoon John Hooker. Already responsible for so many of America’s high-powered telescopes, Hale began raising money once again in 1928, this time for a reflecting telescope with a 200-inch Cassegrain mirror. The wide-field imaging capabilities of this telescope (it has a usable field hundreds of times larger than that of the 200-inch Hale Telescope) makes it ideal for conducting systematic surveys of the sky. In fact, the 200-inch, the world’s largest telescope for a full three decades after its dedication in 1948, was the first telescope to detect the comet during its current return, back in 1982.

It was not at all certain that a glass disk of optical quality that size could be cast. "The telescopes he built are just magnificent, and the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar is still doing cutting-edge science today, 70 years after it opened. Palomar Observatory’s 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope is one of the most productive survey telescopes ever built with a dozen completed surveys since the 1950s. The telescope was names the Hale telescope in his honor.