So, as soon as I say I’m going to go easy on the images and worry about copyright, up I throw a University of Texas photo of its McDonald Observatory, in the (Jeff) Davis Mountains of West Texas.
But this is one of my fav places in the Lone Star, where I was fortunate enough to get to go repeatedly in the 1980s and 1990s as a newspaper reporter. So much that when I retired, the editors gracefully awarded me not a gold watch or whatever but two nights at a rancho-hotel in nearby Fort Davis (for observatory visits) which the boy and Mom and I will take advantage of (most likely) next spring.
L to R: The Otto Struve 2.1 meter, the 11-meter Hobby-Eberly in the distant middle, and the 2.7 meter Harlan Smith, which was used in the 1960s to map the visible side of the moon before the astronauts landed.
The late Harlan Smith, who once gave me a memorable tour of the solar system via one of the small telescopes under the little domes on the right side of the picture, envisioned the Hobby-Eberly but died of cancer before it was finished in 1997. The observatory has a good visitor’s program.
I wonder if the cooks still bake cookies for the astronomers who, of course, work the night shift?
UPDATE Noticed some searchers hunting for the story of the crime at McDonald. Here ’tis: "…one February night in 1970 a McDonald Observatory employee (not a Texan, but an Ohioan newly hired from another observatory!) suffered a breakdown and carried a pistol to the observing floor of the 107-inch [2.7 meter] telescope. He fired a shot at his supervisor, and then unloaded the rest of the clip into the primary mirror. Happily, fused silica is more resilent than ordinary glass, and the big mirror did not break. The craters have been bored out and painted black to reduce any light-scattering effect, and the end result is simply a slight reduction in the efficiency of the telescope. It is now the equivalent of a 106-inch telescope. The incident made the national television news, with Walter Cronkite describing it before a projection showing the wrong telescope upside down." Heh.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 