Vivian's RV Vignettes

The McDonald Observatory Star Party was amazing. The sky was almost totally overcast when the sun went down and we weren’t sure we would get to see anything. A nice observatory employee took us into a theater and gave us an astronomy lecture, trying his best to make it not-disappointing. Then about an hour later, someone came in with a note and he announced that the sky had cleared up! We walked outside to a night of blazing stars with the Milky Way clearly visible overhead. I got to look through the telescopes at Jupiter and Saturn (with their moons), as well as the Andromeda Galaxy. Then another employee with a super-high-power laser pointer gave us a “Constellation Tour.” You could actually tell which stars she was pointing at as she indicated individual stars and constellations.

I wish I could show pictures of what I saw, but of course cell phone cameras don’t do that. You’ll have to settle for daytime pictures of the Big Daddy telescopes (the ones used by real astronomers for research, not the ones we looked through… they keep smaller versions for public use!), and pictures from this morning when the weather was gloriously clear and sunny after all those clouds cleared out.

This is the 107 inch “Biggest Daddy” telescope. It’s the second or third largest in the world (I saw conflicting info).

Proof that Aggies and Longhorns CAN work together when geeky science is on the line.

The “Granddaddy” OG 82 inch telescope that discovered Titan’s atmosphere, among other amazing things. Neil Armstrong planted a mirror on the moon to reflect back to this telescope so they could measure the distance from the earth to the moon within inches.

If you compare this to the previous pics, you can see that the telescope was swinging around. They were setting it up for that night’s stargazing. It was surprisingly quiet for something so big!

I thought this story was cool. You never know what will happen when you spark someone’s interest in science. McDonald ended up donating $800,000 upon his death to establish the observatory.