McDonald Observatory
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In the Davis Mountains of far West Texas, in a place that writers of old might have described as "the western waste," there is a solitary place where devoted men and women spend hours every night in quiet study of the heavens. They go to work in three vaulted cathedrals with acoustics perfectly suited for Gregorian chant. UT Austin's McDonald Observatory is not a monastery, at least not in the traditional sense. But once you think of it in those terms, the similarities are everywhere. William Johnson McDonald, the Paris, Texas, banker who bequeathed the money that paid for the original site and telescope, is even described on his biographical plaque there as a "disciple of science." Its similarity to the monastic life is not just coincidental; there is a spiritual quality to this place. It's not just in the fact that its raison d'tre is a study of the heavens, but in its isolation, the vast emptiness of the surrounding landscape, the magnificent vistas, the quietness of the afternoon, and the pitch black darkness of the night, which is why it was located here in the first place. 
Virtually any trip to McDonald Observatory quickly devolves into a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles-type comedy of endurance. To drive from Austin, you can make it in just under nine hours. Greyhound can get you as far as Fort Stockton (still two hours away) in 10.5 hours, and Amtrak can get you as far as Alpine (still 30 miles away) in a mere 15 hours. So most people with a schedule opt to fly to Midland and make the three-hour drive from there--chasing the setting sun through the gas fields west of Odessa, hanging a hard left at Pecos, and heading happily into the dark. The McDonald Observatory is not a welcoming place for first-time visitors at night. All of the lighted things travelers take for granted--lighted signs and lighted parking lots and lighted sidewalks and porch lights--are missing. It reminds one of a science fair exhibit that teaches children what it's like to be blind. Signs along the winding road implore drivers to "Please Dim Lights." If it is a clear night, after a long climb up Mount Locke along Texas Spur 77, one sees two domes rise up ominously as silhouettes against the stars. You step out of your rental car, look up into the night sky, and it is immediately obvious why the observatory was located here. It is as if God was making ice cream one night and spilled the rock salt all over West Texas, then knocked over the sugar, just before kicking over the milk, which ran down the middle. The bigger of the two domes creaks and moans eerily in the silence of the night, slowly rotating around to allow the telescope inside another view. But if it is a cloudy and moonless night, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face. If you're a visiting astronomer or University of Texas official, you finally reach the journey's end at the TQ (Transients' Quarters) at the base of the larger dome. You park on the side of a little service drive next to the railing that was built after too many visitors tumbled down the hill in the dark. Your only beacon is a low-wattage red bulb that dimly shows a set of double-doors. You pull on one of the double doors, and four feet inside is another set of double doors. It's like the Andromeda Strain, with photons substituting for evil microbes. 
The sun rises to reveal that the night sky was only half the beauty of this place. Stocky pinyon pines and white oaks dot mountainsides that are brown more days a year than green. Some evenings, the staffers gather at the top of a high ridge at sunset to watch red-tail hawks circle below and occasionally swoop down to harvest a field mouse or cottontail rabbit. In late summer, the ground is alive with grasshoppers skittering over the red volcanic rock. Earl Green, a retired Air Force major who has spent the past 11 years as assistant superintendent for observation support, circles the outside of the larger of Mount Locke's domes on a high catwalk. He says that on a clear day from up here, you can see 100 miles, down to the El Norte and Santiago mountains to the southeast, past Alpine into Big Bend, and south to the Cuesta del Burro and Chinati mountains going toward the border town of Presidio. And being at the highest point served by any Texas highway, a lot of folks can see McDonald. "People from Mexico have told us that they can see dos juevos from there," says Green. Make no mistake: If isolation doesn't bother you, and you're a nature lover, this is the place for you. In Austin, it is 85 degrees with 85 percent humidity this morning. Here, you almost need a sweater.
In May, Mark Cash left Houston, where he had been a construction materials salesman. Now he works the McDonald gift shop in the Visitors' Center at the foot of the mountain. "I was sick of the rat race," he says. "It's pretty great to move out here in the middle of nowhere and get a job, involving something I love." Approximately 20 houses nestled together at the base of Mount Locke shelter the 60 people on staff. They are maintenance workers, kitchen help, secretaries, computer experts, and electronics wizards. 
Lunch today is a picnic held in honor of three departing employees, two of whom are going to work in Hawaii for the Keck Observatory, which boasts the only larger telescope in the United States. But it is a net loss of one to Hawaii; just yesterday telescope operator Tony Distasio and his wife Penny (fortunately, they met because of astronomy) moved here from Hawaii. The cooks and maintenance workers grill hamburgers to the sound of crackling conjunto music from a pickup truck radio. A few feet away, a sign on the swimming pool gate provides an "only at McDonald" moment: Pool Rule No. 7 -- "Do not play or climb on the solar panels." The maintenance workers are perhaps the most familiar visual tie to The University of Texas at Austin. Their blue shirts and white pickup trucks with the University seal on their doors supply a taste of home for students and faculty. A slide and a jungle gym are reminders that children are part of this colonial outpost. McDonald operates its own school bus, which carries the children of the observatory's employees along the winding 17-mile mountain road to and from Fort Davis each day. "Living together and working together can be hard," says Green. "It's the same as being in the military, so I'm used to it." Although today, living out here is literally a picnic, it is not always so. Some groceries can be found in Fort Davis and more in Alpine, a town of 6,000 some 40 miles to the southeast. But Shawn Rudine, who works in the Visitors' Center, makes a monthly trek to Odessa to stock up on staple items. The consensus biggest drawback to living out here is the distance to medical care. Alpine does have a hospital but, says Craig Nance, supervisor of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, "If anyone gets in real trouble, they're probably looking at a Medi-vac to Odessa." The Early Years: Mount Locke 
UT president Homer Rainey inaugurated the McDonald Observatory in 1939, the result of an $800,000 gift from William Johnson McDonald. The original attraction is now known as the Otto Struve Telescope, named for the observatory's first director, who oversaw the construction of his eventual namesake. The locals call it simply "the 82," referring to the inches of its mirror's diameter. With its interior painted in hues of battleship gray and institutional blue, the 82's dome houses the administrative offices, every wall built at some challenging angle to fit in the round. A stately little library on the ground floor is filled with astronomy reference books and journals. 
The 82 has seals made of oil-soaked leather, so you should be careful what you lean against in here, says Earl Green. Though its control panels appear ancient and its peripherals look quaint if not classic, this grand old man of the observatory is still used almost every night. The behemoth telescope, which cannot even be fit into the frame of a conventional camera lens, is mounted on concrete piers that are sunk into bedrock below the dome. Everything else floats around those piers so that vibrations in the dome don't affect the telescope. The Harlan J. Smith Telescope ("the 107"), named for the observatory's longtime director who oversaw this telescope's construction, is in most ways just a bigger, newer, and better version of the 82. A marvel of 1960s engineering, this enormous telescope towers four stories over the dome's floor, bouncing and focusing the light down to a single tiny eyepiece, "the instrument," which can be changed out nightly depending on the needs of the astronomer. 
A tour of the inner workings of the dome becomes like a tour of Carlsbad Caverns, with one person going ahead to flip on lights while the other holds the nearest door open. As with the 82, light from the telescope can be diverted into a tiny room just off the floor, to be analyzed with spectrographs. There, it can be reflected underneath the main floor of the dome into a sprawling black cave of an optics lab, where spectrographs with 1,200 grooves per millimeter break the light apart to reveal everything from the mass of a star to its temperature, movement, and chemical make-up. The 107 was actually supported as part of the Apollo program. NASA's moonwalkers left mirrors about a foot square on the surface of the moon. The 107 was then used to aim lasers at those mirrors. The beam sent out is 107 inches across. By the time it reaches the moon it is about 20 miles across; it hits the mirrors and bounces back, and the time it takes to return reveals the exact distance to the moon, which is constantly changing. McDonald currently runs a full-time program of laser ranging, using satellites as well as the moon to measure the continental drift. This program now is run from a group of unassuming trailers on adjacent Mount Fowlkes, one of which contains a small telescope.
At the base of the 107 is the TQ, an early '60s-vintage dormitory that smells slightly of moth balls. Upstairs, off the entrance, a mess hall with paneled walls holds four steel tables where astronomers and graduate students gather for three squares a day. Breakfast is "continental," which usually means raisin bran out of the bin and some do-it-yourself toast. At noon and 6, a cook sets out one entre, a couple of sides, and a dessert; take it or leave it. In one corner is a weather computer, checked frequently to see if tonight will be working or waiting. In another is a tangerine iMac and a PC where astronomers can browse the Web and e-mail their colleagues back home or around the world. At 7 sharp, a full hour before dark, the cook circles the mess hall and pulls closed the black painted shutters and black-out curtains. Downstairs is a paneled rec room with a big screen TV, a vinyl sectional, an out-of-tune spinet, and a pool table that also has seen better days. Framed 8 x 10s of nebulae and star clusters line the lodge-like walls, their version of hunting trophies. In your bedroom, a couple of twin beds await on brown playroom carpet. The white walls are broken up by one lonely print and some well-worn deco furniture. Taken together, the TQ, the 82, and the 107 give a distinctive mid-century feel. Like much of UT Austin's main campus, the fixtures are dated and the place looks lived in. And if you stopped there, you might think that the glory days of the McDonald Observatory were in the past. But then you pull the black-out curtains away from your bedroom window, you look north across a deep valley, and you see Mount Fowlkes. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope 
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope is the crown jewel of the observatory, with a reflector effectively 432 inches across. Located on Mount Fowlkes just to the north of Mount Locke, the HET was completed in 1998 at a cost of about $15 million (a cost shared between UT, Stanford, Penn State, the University of Munich, and Georg-August University in Gttingen, Germany). The telescope, named for former lieutenant governor and higher education champion Bill Hobby and Penn State benefactor Robert Eberly, is a marvel of both research technology and engineering. Although its geodesic dome is huge, it still undersells the size of the telescope, says Craig Nance, who manages the HET full-time. The reason is that most domes must be large enough for their telescopes to tilt and rotate in all directions. The HET can rotate 360 degrees, but instead of tilting to keep up with the apparent movement of stars, it remains at a permanent tilt of 35 degrees. (The angle was picked in order to plumb one of the richest objects in the Northern Hemisphere's sky--the Orion Nebula). A tracker travels across a beam spanning the top of the telescope, doing the work normally done by tilting. 
The now-famous mirror is a slightly concave honeycomb of 91 hexagonal mirrors--each a 260-pound slab of glass coated in silver. The mirrors were cut from one gargantuan piece of glass that had, luckily for UT, cracked during another project. They were shipped from Germany to Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., to be shaped, then to New Jersey to be coated. Add to each mirror the turquoise, three-armed robotic assemblies that support and control them, plus the structure that supports the tracking beam, and the entire telescope weighs in at 84 tons, all of which rotates on air gaskets that ride on a gigantic concrete ring. Even the dome is different, opening like a clam shell instead of with the traditional slot. 
With this design, which allowed the telescope to be built at roughly one-tenth the cost of a comparable telescope operated traditionally, there can be no practical eyepiece, as there is on the 82 and 107. Instead, the tracker beam carries the light, via a fiber-optic cable five times thicker than those used in communications cables to an optics lab underneath the telescope and to the control room in an adjacent building. "These are really light pipes," says Nance with a little swagger, finding new ways to brag on the facility in layman's terms. (Nance beams when relating that he is one of a select few who have actually held an eyepiece to the tracker and beheld the mirror's bounty with the naked eye.) Outside, a tall, slender cylinder protrudes above the dome. At its top is a laser used to ensure that the mirrors are in tune with each other. Nance tells one of the telescope operators in the control room that we are going up in the lift. It's a standard safety precaution to let others working in the building know when you're going aloft. A rack outside the control room holds a dozen contraptions that look like mountain climbing harnesses. With legs and arms threaded through appropriate holes, we climb into a cherry-picker, hook our harnesses onto the basket in which we're standing, and begin the slow climb up and over one of the world's largest mirrors. It is raining now. Nance grabs a pair of ear plugs and throws me a pair, just in case it's too loud when we get near the roof. Just as we reach the apex, a thunder clap. "Okay, that was lightning," he says. "We need to get down." He has been in the dome once before when it was struck by lightning. It's a good target: metal object on one of the highest peaks in Texas. It didn't hurt anything. "It just makes a really loud noise," Nance says, gesturing like Thor pounding his fist on the dome. The room directly below the telescope looks a bit like a TV studio. Its walls, like virtually everything else, are painted black, and cables and cords run overhead and occasionally across the floor. In the middle is a group of walk-in freezers that have been retrofitted for astronomy research because they can be made so dark. UT has a project going in one. Another is Penn State's domain. The fiber optics are fed through the ceilings of these lockers. Inside, the light is shot out of the cable and into one of the spectrographs. Pound for pound, these are the most expensive pieces of equipment on the mountain. One spectrograph, which to the layman might be mistaken for a four-foot section of black sewer pipe, cost a quarter million dollars. "One day," Nance speculates, "humans won't even come in these rooms." They'll become like clean rooms used for microchip manufacturing, he says. The innovative design of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope is already having a profound effect around the world. On September 1, 2000, a delegation from the McDonald Observatory helped break ground for the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) project. The SALT will be a virtual copy of the HET in Sutherland in that country's Northern Cape Province, and McDonald Observatory officials are excited to be able to plumb the sky of the Southern Hemisphere as deeply as the HET plumbs the north. The HET consortium will contribute no cash but will contribute the plans for HET plus a lot of valuable experience in exchange for 10 percent of the viewing time. In addition to the three major telescopes, the McDonald Observatory operates two others of note: a 36-inch completed in 1956 and a 30-inch built in 1970. Though they are small in comparison, they have been used to create beautiful images (sold in the gift shop on coffee mugs, postcards, and mouse pads) of distant nebulae. The biggest telescope normally used for the "star parties" the observatory holds three nights a week for its visitors is 16 inches, plenty big enough to see Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons. The Order of McDonald McDonald Observatory has a telescope allocation committee that screens original requests for observing time. From this committee, the requests go into a "queue," and McDonald's resident astronomers determine the order in which the observations can be made, says Ed Dutchover, assistant superintendent. 
UT professor Anita Cochran, who has been coming to McDonald for 24 years, admits that the commute to McDonald "gets a little old." She remembers the days of chartering a plane that would fly from Austin to Marfa (30 miles away) in two hours. Times and budgets change. But she is quick to add that many things have changed for the better in that time. For one, it is actually darker now than it was even 15 years ago, she says, owing to the numerous efforts in surrounding counties to deflect light down to the ground instead of letting it escape. There are no billboards in surrounding counties with upward pointing lights, and the Alpine City Council recently passed an ordinance mandating all street lights be retrofitted with covers/deflectors. For another thing, Cochran now sits in the relative comfort of a control room and works via a computer screen, instead of shivering in the cold at an eyepiece of a telescope that must be open to the elements. UT Austin has only 45 to 50 astronomy majors, but teaches astronomy to more than 3,000 students per semester. On campus, there is a 9-inch telescope at Painter Hall more than a century old, and a 16-inch atop Robert Lee Moore Hall, where the department is housed, which is mainly used for star parties and public outreach. There is viewing in Austin, but there is no "observing" in or near Austin nor any other major city; too much light pollution. Besides its darkness, another benefit of being out here is that this area enjoys 300 days of sunshine per year. Today is not one of those days. Graduate students Diane Paulson and Nairn Baliber are working on a joint project to observe a planet in another solar system as it passes between the earth and that planet's sun. They are hoping that by analyzing the light from that star before and during that eclipse, they can deduce some properties of the planet. But a storm system keeps streaming up out of Mexico, and because this planet's revolution is fairly infrequent, their trip to West Texas has been a bust. It reminds one of the fishing life when the fish are not biting. Or the hurry-up-and-wait of fire station living. There is no running across the street to the mall. And so astronomers play the waiting game. They surf the Web and check the weather computer and shoot pool and talk politics. But always return to science. From Monastery to Pilgrims' Shrine 
The one way in which McDonald Observatory is decidedly not like a monastery is that there are few monasteries that get 130,000 visitors a year. That's better than 350 a day, and McDonald is open to visitors every day of the year except Christmas, New Year's Day, and Thanksgiving Day. If you want to talk about ways in which UT Austin reaches out and touches the public, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more dramatic example. Besides football, there is nothing UT does that attracts so many citizens, and nothing in the academic realm comes close. During March, when most spring breaks occur, the observatory gets 1,000 visitors a night. The staff expands the program from three to six star parties a week, and from two tours a day to six or seven. During the bulk of the year, the visitor stream narrows to about 100-150 a day, says Shannon Rudine, another native Houstonian working in the Visitors' Center. Incredibly, when tourists to Texas are polled, one in five say they intend to visit the McDonald Observatory. For special celestial events such as the approach of a comet, they have had up to 1,000 visitors stand in one line for a few seconds at the eyepiece of one of the Mount Locke telescopes. During normal star parties, they roll out three to five telescopes and are helped out by area volunteers, many from the Big Bend Astronomical Society based in Alpine. Fortunately, there are lots of amateur astronomers who have moved to the area for the same reason McDonald has, and they enjoy the fruits of McDonald's efforts to keep it dark. Basking in the dark, if you will. One program lets visitors into the 82 for a three-hour tour of the sky in which the telescope is focused on one object, and a maximum of 20 people take turns viewing it (usually for about a minute apiece) before the telescope is moved to the next object. For the hard core, there is an occasional all-night program. What's the most popular object in the sky for visitors? Rudine says planetary nebulae, especially ring nebulae. Planets are popular as well. The 107 is the biggest telescope in the world that the public is allowed to look through (once a month). This place, like the subject it studies, has a way of pulling people into science. Mark Cash in the Visitors' Center just bought his own 8-inch telescope over the Internet, and the other guys at the Visitors' Center are teaching him constellations. Now in his mid-30s, he's enrolled in college for the first time--Sul Ross State University in Alpine--taking astronomy courses so that one day he can get out from behind the sales counter and give tours, holding forth on astronomy with confidence. "It's very much fun to watch people get into this," says Professor Cochran. Down at the Visitors' Center, some 20 people, a few families but mostly retirees in windbreakers and running shoes, are here for the Tuesday night star party, never mind that it's now a downpour. "Okay, so it's Plan B," says Cash cheerfully. "We've got a spectroscopy demonstration we're going to do for you all to show you how our telescopes break light down and analyze it. We've also got a video of a tour of the moon that was done on our 30-inch, and we've got a video called Powers of 10." They are here; they paid their $5 per head; and they have absolutely nowhere else to go. So the show goes on, and in the meantime they buy quite a few T-shirts, coffee mugs, sun dials, prints, science kits, and star charts. 
In anticipation of ever greater public interest, the observatory began construction in September 2000 on a new visitors' center, to be open by the end of 2001 and to be known as the Texas Astronomy Education Center. The current Visitors' Center is 2,300 square feet, and the TAEC will be 11,000 square feet and will contain an interactive science museum. Diane Paulson always wanted to be an astronaut. But when she was eight, she watched as the Challenger exploded on TV, then promptly decided that what she really wanted was to be an astronomer. Graduate student Anjum Mukadam was a world away from Paulson, in Bombay, but was about the same age, 10, when she decided that she wanted to be "a scientist who studies stars." (She didn't even know the word for it yet.) Now she studies pulsating white dwarfs--dead stars. How did she pick this as a specialty? "It's just a means to getting a more accurate age of the universe," she says. Most astronomers' specialties sound very narrow, but in fact speak to our broadest questions about the universe. And McDonald Observatory is where they continue to come to find those answers. By Avrel Seale, from The Alcalde magazine
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