February 14 - McDonald Observatory

It’s Valentine’s Day, which I am not spending with my beautiful wife this year . . .

I woke up at 5:45 to a 55°, mostly cloudy morning, and went over to the motel office to eat a waffle breakfast, and pack the car.  I headed up to the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, as there had been a report of the Montezuma Quail there earlier in the winter.  The visitors’ center opens at 10 a.m., so I had an hour to poke around.  I drove up to the mountain top to see what might be seen near the telescope buildings.

There was a 30-knot west wind blowing, so most of the birds were hunkered down, although the juncos ventured out into the wind.

The sign in the background blew over while I watched . . .

A family of Javelinas were near the top of Mount Locke

which is the highest point in the Texas Highway system.
Since there was little birding to be done in this wind, I went into the Visitors’ center to take in the museum exhibits.  The Observatory is at the cutting edge of astronomy, with their new telescope investigating Black Space.

The observatory offers a wide range of state-of-the-art instrumentation for imaging and spectroscopy in the optical and infrared, available to the research community on the 0.8 m Telescope, the 2.1 m Otto Struve Telescope, the 2.7 m Harlan J.Smith Telescope, and the 10 m Hobby-Eberly Telescope. Also hosted at the observatory, is a 1 m node of the globally networked Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT), one of two robotically controlled 1.2 m MOnitoring NEtwork of Telescopes (MONET), a 0.51 m telescope dedicated to optical aeronomy, and one of four globallly networked Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) telescopes. The observatory also operates one of the first and most productive lunar ranging stations.

There is also a Very Long Baseline Array dish on the premises

 

I left the mountain at about 11 a.m., having ‘dipped’ on seeing the quail, and avoiding those “Loose Livestock”.

How do the ranchers tighten these things up?

I drove out Highway 118 to Interstate 10 and west to El Paso, taking the cutoff around Fort Bliss and Franklin Mountain, then north on Interstate 25 to Albuquerque.  And – guess what?  I got to go through yet another Customs and Border Patrol check station

Read Jesus' Words:  Matthew 25:31-46 then call your Congressman and demand an end to this

I pulled into Albuquerque and to the Motel 6, checked in for $47, and went across the parking lot to the Buffalo Wings place to have a Santa Fe Salad, 2 pints of nitro stout, and potato bites for $29.  A little steep, but I got to watch the Canadian women’s team beat the U.S. 4-3 in hockey.