Aerial view of the McDonald Observatory. (The Hobby-Eberly Telescope is seen in the foreground.)

The McDonald Observatory is located in the Davis Mountains , 450 miles west of Austin, Texas (USA). The observatory is equipped with a wide range of instrumentation for imaging and spectroscopy in the optical and infrared, and operates one of the first lunar ranging stations . McDonald is part of the astronomy program of the University of Texas at Austin.

The Otto Struve Telescope and the Harlan J. Smith Telescope are located on Mount Locke at an altitude of 6,791 feet. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope, dedicated in late 1997, is located on the summit of Mount Fowlkes at 6,659 feet above sea level. The high and dry peaks of the Davis Mountains make for some of the darkest and clearest night skies in the region and therefore provide excellent conditions for viewing the heavens.

Currently, the observatory operates four research telescopes at its West Texas site:

• 11m Hobby-Eberly Telescope;
• 2.7m Harlan J. Smith Telescope ;
• 2.1m Otto Struve Telescope ;
• and an 0.8m telescope.

The observatory also hosts one of the four globally networked Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) telescopes, and is a Monitoring Network of Telescopes (MONET) site.

History

The McDonald Observatory was originally endowed by the Texas banker William Johnson McDonald (1844 – 1926), who left $800,000 (the bulk of his fortune) to the University of Texas to endow an astronomical observatory.

See also

• List of observatories

External link

• McDonald Observatory - official site.