A Mountaintop O' Fun!

The McDonald Observatory is outside of Ft. Davis, Texas in the middle of the Davis Mountains in Jefferson Davis County.  If you detect some trend there, I don't see it.

The Observatory consists of 8 large professional optical telescopes on Mount Locke.  There is a visitors' center at the base of the mountain.  A new, much larger visitors' center is being built and should be finished by the middle of the summer of 2001.  It was needed to accommodate the huge number of visitors that the observatory is attracting (over 130,000 in 2000 and growing).  The number of visitors is interesting because this place is really out in the middle of nowhere, which is good for an observatory.  The nearest major cities are between a 3 and 4 hours drive.  The nearest Wal-Mart is 125 miles away.  The stars are bright and the sky is dark in this heart of Texas.

This is the entrance to the original telescope on Mount Locke, the Struve Telescope, which is still in service.  It has an 82" mirror.  There is a vacuum chamber with a special hoisting system inside the building so they can re-coat the mirror with aluminum every two years.

This is the Hubble-Eberly Telescope (HET), which has the largest mirror in the world, over 400".  It is a fixed mirror, however, and uses a moving focus and mount to move across the sky.  The mirror is divided into large hexagonal segments which can be independently controlled in a coordinated manner to focus on various spots in the sky.  The small white dome you see to the upper right of the large dome is a small laser targeting tool that is aimed into the telescope to align (collimate) the mirrors.  It is used to primarily for spectral analysis of stars and other objects in the sky.  This has been especially useful in the search for extra solar planets (planets of solar systems other than ours).