Friday,
October 6, 2012
Didn’t sleep
real well as something was foraging around our campsite, not sure what, I was
too scared to look. No javelina run
throughs however. Coffee, showered and
drove up to McDonald Observatory. We got
there 40 minutes early in true Jack fashion.
We ate our breakfast and were first through the doors as usual. We signed up for the daytime tour and the
Star Party, we are hoping for clear skies.
Looks good so far. We went
through some of the exhibits, learned about asteroids and saw pictures of where
they hit earth and why there so many more on the moon and other planets. We also learned our sun is a middle aged star
and only has about 4.5 billion years left.
If you took 1000 earths and lined them up, they would be the diameter of
the sun. He showed us the sun in real
time from one of the telescopes and the sunspots and solar flares. They also showed a photo from the past 24
hours of the Aurora Borealis with a meteor streaking through in Norway. Very
beautiful photo.
The telescopes here
were instrumental in assisting with the Space Program in the early 60’s. The Observatory is run by UT Austin and in
collaboration with Penn State and 2 universities in Germany. It is here, because it is one of the darkest
places in the USA and also because of it’s latitude which allows a wider
visualization of space. It is the
southernmost of all USA observatories.
We got to tour two of the telescopes, both very interesting, and learned
how they worked. They employ 80 people,
some full time astronomers, some who rarely leave the mountain. If an outside astronomer (out of the
university system that runs it)wants to use the telescopes, it costs several
thousand dollars a night to use. One of the telescopes cost 50 million dollars!
After
leaving the observatory, we faced a major crises. We realized we were out of coffee
filters! After javelin watching duty and
poor sleep we were in big trouble. We
punched in a Starbuck’s into the GPS just for the fun of it. Closest one 124 miles away in Odessa. Howard please come to our rescue! We drove to Fort Davis and bought the last
package of filters they had, cost was no object! Luckily Jack wanted to explore the town and
he found Fort Davis National Historic site, Fort Davis. Jefferson Davis was the secretary of war at
the time, and he ordered the building of the fort here to protect travelers from
San Antonio to El Paso in 1857 right before the Civil War. The dirt road from El Paso to San Antonio
still runs through the fort. They also
have enlisted men’s barracks and officer’s quarters. They are working on restoring the
hospital. It is in a beautiful
setting.
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| Officer's quarters at Fort Davis |
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| Road to San Antonio |
At the start of the Civil War
it became a Confederate Fort as Texas was a Southern State but they fought more
Indians than Union soldiers. In 1867, it was taken over by US government and in
1891 it was abandoned and no longer in use. We went back to the campground and
had dinner and headed back up to the Observatory for the Star Party. We got there early and walked around for
awhile. When it got dark, the stars came
out in numbers that we had never previously witnessed. So amazing.
The first part of the Star Party took place in an amphitheatre where a
guy taught us about the constellations, Polaris (the North Star), Arc Turus
(the brightest star in the sky). We also
learned that if you get lost you can figure out your latitude (as if that is
going to help) You go to Polaris, place
your fist out in front of you with the arm extended so top of fist is at
Polaris and then count down how many fists to the horizon and that will tell
you the latitude. We did it and it was
indeed 3 fists so 30 degrees latitude which is where we were. We learned that
if you go to the Little Dipper and go to the second star in the 3 star handle
that if you look right at it, you cannot see it, but if you look off just beside
it you can see it. It is a distant star and not as bright as the others. This
is because of the way our eyes our designed.
The center of our eye does not detect light very well, but the area just
outside the center of our eye detects light very well. We got to look through 5 different telescopes
seeing a young star system, a dying star system, the Andromeda Galaxy. It makes one feel quite small when you are
told there are billions of stars in the Andromeda Galaxy and that it is many,
many light years away. Andromeda is in
the Pegasus galaxy so he showed us where in the sky it is. Wonderful experience, highly recommend it to
anyone willing to travel to west Texas. I am already planning our next trip, as I was unable to convince Jack to go to Big Bend National Park and everyone we run into tells us how fabulous it is. The only problem is that like Texas itself, it is huge and apparently it is 90 miles from the edge of the park to the visitor center and all the way down on the Mexico border far from any major city.
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