Founding of Kitt Peak National Observatory

Kitt Peak National Observatory is an astronomical observatory in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, on land leased from the Tohono O'odham Nation, who regard the mountain as sacred. It was established in the late 1950s as a national facility, open to astronomers from across the United States, and was one of the first of its kind. It has a large collection of optical and solar telescopes, including the Mayall 4-metre telescope and the McMath-Pierce solar telescope, once the largest of its type. Kitt Peak is run by NSF NOIRLab, and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is on the Mayall telescope, where it maps millions of galaxies.

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