Frontier Fort to High Tech Telescope

Saturday, March 20, 2010 – First Day of Spring

Well it might be the first day of spring but those Damned Canadians sent in a cold front last night.  The water hose was darned near frozen – just a trickle coming through the tap until we ran it for about 5 minutes.  Snow flurries in the air.  Kids outside catching the snow flakes in their mouths.  People had video cameras out taking pictures.  Propane furnace on and trying to warm up the trailer.  And a fierce north wind that howled all night and kept the trailer rocking and rolling. Prompted the National Weather Service to post wind warnings for the area just north of here in the Guadalupe Mountains. Got down to about –4 Celsius in the night.  To think we were in shorts and T-shirts yesterday. The temperature was warmer in Winnipeg!!  Brrrrr!!!!!

We jumped into our lined jeans, long underwear, gloves, parkas and toques to see Fort Davis National Historic Site.  The fort was first established in 1854, to protect the new “colonists” from attack by the local Apache and Comanche tribes. It was abandoned around the Civil War in 1861 until 1867 when a new fort was constructed.  These are the remains and restored structures that we visited.

Most interesting was the fort hospital which contains some of the surgeon’s operating equipment. Very primitive by today's standards; the main tool was  a saw and other equipment used for amputations.

Colonel Grierson was the commanding officer of the fort and his rank was evidenced by his family residence, the largest on Officers’ Row.  It is fully furnished with period furniture complete with nursery and servant’s quarters.

The fort  was the home to four companies of Afro-American troops who were called Buffalo Soldiers.  The Indians named them this, because their curly hair so closely resembled that of buffalo fur. The black soldiers were not treated well by their white commanding officers.  They also were paid $13 dollars/month as opposed to white enlisted men who received $15/month.

 

Sunday, March 21, 2010

We visited the McDonald Observatory today.  The observatory is operated by the University of Texas in Austin and was located in this remote part of Texas for a number of reasons.  West Texas is sparsely populated, so it does not have the same degree of “light pollution” as experienced in the east. (Our guide also quipped that the nearest Wal-Mart was over 90 miles away!) The observatory is located at approx 6800 feet above sea level which raises it above much of the atmospheric pollution and haze experienced at a lower elevation.  At 30 degrees north latitude it can still see a good portion of the southern hemisphere skies. It is also very dry here with less than 12 inches of precipitation per year, offering many clear nights for observations.

When it was first built the observatory housed the third largest telescope of its kind in the world with a reflecting mirror of 107 inches and weighing 7800 pounds.  The total weight of the telescope is 320,000 pounds yet it is so finely balanced that it can be positioned with only a one horsepower electric motor.  The dome of the telescope rotates around the telescope.  This is quite disorienting, as you are sure that the telescope floor is rotating…the only way I was able to grasp this was by looking at the emergency exit door where some light was coming in and then watching the dome move past the door.  Really strange! It was like an ice box in this dome as they keep it as close as possible to the outside temperature and it hadn’t started to warm up yet.  This helps prevent condensation and undue expansion of the mirror – the temperature got down to approx. –8 Celsius last night and eventually got up to about 17 Celsius.

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), is a totally different type of telescope. It is a spectroscopic telescope which means it gathers light from a star and breaks it down into it’s component wavelengths, thereby offering a higher degree of analysis than can be obtained from an optical telescope.  Furthermore the scientist does not have to be present to capture this information; all he does is submit his list of requirements to a technician who can input these requirements into the computer controlled system and the technician can obtain the information digitally.  The telescope does not have the large classical tube configuration as does the 107 inch telescope, but rather it is an open frame with a tracker mechanism at the top and a series of 91 individual, six-sided metre wide by 2 inch thick mirrors each operated by a motor to keep all the mirrors in synch.  I couldn’t get a good shot of this telescope as there was too much reflection from the mirrors.  Here is the link to see it Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), I don’t understand all the science behind this but it is indeed fascinating!

The observatory just finished it’s Spring Break program of “Star Parties” last night – they open up some of the smaller telescopes in the amphitheatre behind the visitor centre so that people can experience star gazing “up close and personal”  During the last two weeks they have had two nights with over 900 people for the Star Party.  The rest of the time they only had about 700 per night.  The spring break time frame is the observatory’s busiest time of the year. The Star Party is only offered on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday for the balance of the year.  The exhibition hall has lots of hands-on experiences for young people – obviously aimed at getting them interested in astronomy as a career. I can see this as being a very effective method of doing just that.