The McDonald Observatory has changed dramatically since my last visit in the early 80's! Since then, they have had two new visitor centers and added the terrific Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), which was designed by two Penn State astronomers. "The HET was designed and constructed with a unique objective: to gather a very large amount of light, specifically for spectroscopy, at extremely low cost."
We took the daytime tour of the 107" Smith telescope, which was cooled to about 40 degrees in preparation for a night of viewing. Then observed the sun and learned about sunspots, solar flares, and other interesting astronomical phenomena.
The temperature should dip into the 20's tonight so we opted not to stay for the night viewing.
