The Big Scopes
The McDonald Observatory, near Ft. Davis, TX, is one of the best known observatories in the US. Any of you NPR listeners may have heard their Star Date radio program. It supposedly has one of the darkest skies in the US, a great thing if you want to look at the stars. The Observatory has many programs but they have Star Parties every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday evening. I made sure I arrived at Davis Mountains State Park on Tuesday so I could catch the big show. It turned out to be nearly a perfect night for star gazing – no clouds and just the first day of a new moon. I went to the Twilight program first, which I wouldn’t recommend, but the Star Party more than made up for it. They had a general program pointing out many constellations, the Andromeda galaxy and some of the planets. We then got a chance to look through several telescopes of various sizes at some interesting stuff like the Orion nebula (fancy word meaning gaseous cloud) and Saturn. Saturn was so clear it almost looked fake. After checking out the 5 telescopes they had set up for individual viewing, we then went into the theatre where they beamed in live camera shots from other, more powerful telescopes. It would have been really cool if they had printed off shots that we could take, but no luck with that so I have no pictures for you. You’ll have to settle for going to their website at http://www.mcdonaldobservatory.org. All in all, it was pretty amazing and I would highly recommend it if you ever find yourself out in the middle of the West Texas desert.
Davis Mountain State Park is a nice little park with a couple of hiking trails. I tried to take Abbey out in the morning before it got too hot so she got a little exercise. They have a year round population of white-winged doves. They were quite loud in the morning and evening and I think Abbey was even wondering what was making all the racket. Luckily they slept most of the night and didn’t wake up too early. On Thursday night the Interpretive Center had a showing of the March of Penguins which I had been wanting to see. It’s a pretty amazing documentary if you haven’t seen it yet. Of course, my nephew, Robbie, told me “Uncle Eddie, it’s stupid. It’s about penguins,” when I told him I wanted to see it. What else would you expect from a teenager, though.