Mcdonald observatory5/2/2023 ![]() Star parties are held three times a week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The observatory is known for its star parties ($25), including a lecture in an outdoor amphitheater and easy access to the Rebecca Gale Telescope Park located next to the Visitors Center. When I suggested to Kel that we plan a trip to Marfa and Big Bend National Park, she excitedly brought up McDonald Observatory, located 38 miles north of Marfa in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. The observatory is a research unit of the University of Texas at Austin and is open to the public. Here, professional astronomers use one of the world's largest optical telescopes, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, for astronomical research on dark energy, faraway galaxies, and planets orbiting distant stars. The term does sound all made up, but in a few decades, thanks to the work done at the McDonald Observatory, the concept of dark energy might be as familiar a part of general astronomy as the fact the Earth orbits the sun, which was astronomy’s mind-blowing idea in its own 16th-century day.The McDonald Observatory in Texas offers astronomers and curious visitors some of the darkest night skies in the continental United States. Struggling to write a coherent sentence using the phrase “dark energy” taxes our intellectual stamina, so we refer readers who want to know more about it to the dark energy experiment’s website,. UT’s Steven Weinberg, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics, has called dark energy “the central problem for physics” that will remain “the bone in our throat” until it’s understood. Scientists, at a loss to explain the acceleration they were observing, called this mystery force “dark energy.”Īs astronomers like to say, dark energy might not be dark and it might not be energy, but it is pervasive, making up about 70 percent of the universe’s matter and energy. Some unknown, invisible force was at work. In the late 1990s, however, astronomers discovered that parts of the universe were expanding at a faster rate than their understanding of gravity allowed. Smith Telescope, with a 107-inch mirror, began scanning the skies in 1968.īut it’s the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, dedicated in 1997 with a 362-inch mirror and fitted with instruments to analyze light’s various properties, that is currently being refitted for the observatory’s dark energy research.Īstronomers have known for about a century that the universe is expanding. So if you find yourself at one of the observatory’s star parties or listening to the observatory’s StarDate radio segment, or enjoying any of several other public activities sponsored by the observatory, extend a silent thank you to McDonald for his grand and generous donation.Ĭonstruction of the observatory’s first major telescope, the Otto Struve Telescope, with an 82-inch mirror, was finished in 1939. ![]() ![]() ![]() McDonald also left instructions that the university use the observatory to promote astronomy with the public. McDonald’s will called for the university to use the money to build an observatory, which meant UT first needed to establish an astronomy department, which it did not then have. In 1926, a bachelor banker and amateur astronomer in Paris - the Northeast Texas town, not, you know, the French city - named William Johnson McDonald left most of his million-dollar estate to UT.
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