Today after breakfast we traveled north about 25 miles to the small town of Fort Davis, TX to visit the Fort Davis National Historic Site.
Fort Davis is one of the best remaining examples of a frontier military post that was established during the western expansion and the corresponding Indian Wars during the latter part of the 19th Century.
The fort was originally established in 1854 and was a key post in the defense system of West Texas. Troops stationed at the post protected emigrants, freighters, mail coaches, and travelers on the San Antonio-El Paso Road. During the Civil War the post was abandoned by the Union troops in 1861, was briefly occupied by Confederate troops and again occupied by the U.S. Army in 1862. By 1880, the fort had become a major installation with over 100 structures and quarters for 400 troops, including the 10th U.S. Calvary Regiment, the all-black (with white officers) "Buffalo Soldiers". After 1880 most of the Indian War activity in the area had subsided and garrison life at the fort became mostly routine. And, in 1891 after Wounded Knee, the Indian Wars were essentially over and the fort was decommissioned.
After the fort was shut down, it fell into the same disrepair that befell most other abandoned frontier posts. Some upkeep was attempted, but many of the original structures disappeared. A dedicated restoration effort was eventually mounted years later by the State of Texas, Lyndon Johnson and other supporters and the fort was eventually designated as a National Historic Site in 1963. Since then, a major restoration effort was undertaken and today many of the original structures have been saved and others restored and furnished as they would have looked during its operation. The foundations and partial structures of other original buildings have also been preserved and identified.
The National Park service has done an excellent job in restoring and maintaining the site. There is an excellent museum displaying the post's history and artifacts from the time are on display. Many of the buildings are furnished and open to the public. Fort Davis is off of the highway but well worth the visit.
Our next stop was the McDonald Observatory, 17 miles north of Fort Davis.
After arriving at the observatory we had lunch at the observatory restaurant the "ROY G BIV" Star Date Cafe.
After a great cafe lunch, we picked up our reservation tags for the three tours we signed up for.
McDonald Observatory, a research unit of The University of Texas at Austin, is one of the world's leading centers for astronomical research, teaching, and public education and outreach. Observatory facilities are located atop Mount Locke and Mount Fowlkes in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, which offer some of the darkest night skies in the continental United States. Mount Locke at 6800 ft. elevation is also the highest mountain in the Davis Mountains.
The observatory was established in 1939 as a joint venture between the University of Texas and the University of Chicago and has continued to expand since then. It now has over 12 permanent telescopes on the site including two very large telescopes, one of which is the first spectrum array telescope which has become the model for most new and larger telescopes.
The observatory also has an extensive public outreach program which was a condition of the original benefactor, Texas banker William Johnson McDonald. He left the bulk of his fortune to The University of Texas at Austin “for the purpose of aiding in erecting and equipping an Astronomical Observatory to be kept and used in connection with and as part of the University for the study and promotion of the study of Astronomical Science.
Our first tour was a solar viewing and a tour of the facility including a visit to two of the large telescopes. The tour started in the auditorium with a video of the history and current activities of the observatory. We next had an excellent briefing about the sun, its composition and the various activities associated with it. The highlight of the presentation were real time images of the sun viewed through various filters (actually a 8 minute delay due to image transmission time over the 93 million mile distance). The images were directly from a telescope and were displayed on a large screen.
After the presentation we visited the first telescope, The Harlan J. Smith Telescope constructed 1966-68. The Smith Telescope has a 2.7-meter (107-inch) mirror, which was the third largest in the world when built. This telescope is used every clear night of the year.
The next telescope we visited was The Hobby-Eberly Telescope.With its 10-meter mirror, the HET is one of the world's largest optical telescopes. Completed in 1997, the telescope has recently undergone a complete upgrade. The HET is optimized for spectroscopy, the decoding of light from stars and galaxies to study their properties. This makes it ideal for searching for planets around other stars, as well as probing distant galaxies, exploding stars, black holes, and more. Soon, the telescope will begin a major study of dark energy, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX).
The HET is a joint project of The University of Texas at Austin, The Pennsylvania State University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. During our vist we were surprised to see a picture of the inventors of the telescope technology, Hobby-Eberly, both from Penn State, posing next to the famous Penn State Nittany Lion Statue, a location where we also have posed for pictures.
The event after the tour was a Twilight Program. This one was a multimedia presentation and demonstrations about the moon. We learned just about everything we ever wanted to know about the moon in the excellent one hour presentation.
After the Twilight Program it was dark and time for the next event, the Star Party. This event started in a large outdoor auditorium where a docent talked about and pointed out the various planets and constellations visible that night. It was a dark sky, but somehat diminshed by the rising moon that was starting to wane after a full moon the night before. After the presentation the there were about a dozen telescopes were available for viewing various stars, nebulae, and the moon.
After viewing a few celestial bodies our fun meter maxed out after a very long day and we headed back to the RV Park arriving after 10:00 pm.
