Toward the end of the war Vannevar Bush, head of the military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development and a former MIT administrator, drafted a proposal for a new federal agency devoted to science funding. McDonald Observatory staff, for example, took part in military rocket propulsion studies in the New Mexico badlands near the secret atomic research complex at Los Alamos.

Scientists’ contributions to the war effort proved invaluable and the sparsely populated southwest had offered an ideal testing ground for dangerous and highly classified projects. World War II brought about a major restructuring of federal financial support for academic science research. New facilities like UT’s McDonald Observatory began to narrow the gap, but it had to fill positions with scientists from the University of Chicago.

Historian George Webb describes the southwest in the early twentieth century as a “colony” of American science: the region was valuable to eastern-based researchers as a source of exotic flora and fauna, and to astronomers for its dark, clear skies, but it lacked top-tier research institutions of its own. The school’s lack of trained astronomers reflected a gap in the scientific capabilities of western and eastern universities prior to the Second World War. When he died in 1926, his will bequeathed nearly one million dollars to UT for an observatory.īy 1934, UT had an observatory in the mountains of west Texas but no astronomers to staff it. McDonald served in the Confederate army during the Civil War and later became a wealthy banker. The land and money for the observatory came from the estate of William Johnson McDonald, born in Texas in 1844. The McDonald Observatory, like many other science facilities, owes a great deal of its success to the NSF and to the political environment that prompted its creation. It was during those years that the National Science Foundation was born and grew into an institution of enormous financial importance for researchers. The forty-year interval between 1934 when the observatory came into existence and 1973 when McDonald personnel and UT faculty traveled to Mauritania to study the longest solar eclipse of the twentieth century was a period of truly giant leaps for science in America and in the southwest in particular. In historical terms, however, the transformation of the McDonald Observatory from a peripheral start-up into an internationally recognized hub of scientific research was no small step.

Each dome shelters an enormous yet delicate, tool: a combination of mirrors, metal, and electronics capable of gathering light from long ago and far, far away.ĭecades are a relatively tiny unit of temporal measurement on an astronomical scale, and the distances between terrestrial points are vanishingly small compared to the distances between celestial bodies. From Marfa to Mauritania: The Rise of the McDonald Observatoryįour hundred and fifty miles west of The University of Texas at Austin, thirty-seven miles (as the car drives) north of Marfa, and almost 6,800 feet above sea level sit the white and silver domes of the McDonald Observatory.

Mcdonald observatory