Changing Directions

For its first three decades, McDonald Observatory was operated as a scientific partnership. The University of Texas provided the facilities, while the University of Chicago provided the astronomers.

Harlan J. Smith, the first Texas director of McDonald ObservatoryIt was an arrangement born of necessity. Texas received a bequest to build an observatory from William J. McDonald. The university didn’t have an astronomy program, though, so it contracted with Chicago, which needed new telescopes for its world-class research team.

The arrangement brought great scientific returns. Otto Struve, the Observatory’s first director, studied the stars, while Gerard Kuiper made important discoveries about Mars and the other worlds of the solar system. Other Chicago astronomers made equally important contributions.

In the early 1960s, though, the partnership was coming to an end. Years later, the first Texas-hired McDonald director, Harlan J. Smith, described the state of the place:

SMITH: The Obs