![]() ![]() He retired as director in 1989 and was succeeded by Frank N. Under Smith's guidance, both the department and the observatory underwent enormous expansion, compelling him to relinquish the chairmanship in 1979. Smith was appointed director of the observatory and chairman of the UT Astronomy Department. At the end of the original operating agreement between the universities of Texas and Chicago, UT had organized an astronomy department, and in September 1963 Harlan J. Morgan of Chicago from April 1959 to August 1963. Bengt Strömgren of Denmark was director from January 1951 to August 1957 and William W. Kuiper was director from September 1947 to December 1949 and again from September 1957 to March 1959 Struve was honorary director to 1950. At the end of the war McDonald astronomers received many prestigious awards from several American and European astronomical societies.ĭutch immigrant Gerard P. World War II severely restricted astronomical research in many parts of the world, but McDonald continued as an active observatory, gaining the services of several European astronomers who fled from their invaded homelands. Dedication of the telescope took place on May 5, 1939, with a symposium attended by most of the world's leading astronomers. The location was regarded as ideal, not only because of minimal dust and artificial light, both obstacles to astronomical observation, but also because of the proportion of clear night skies. Fowlkes, which brought the site area to 400 acres. Development of the site was supplemented by a land donation from the adjoining ranch made by the estate of Judge Edwin H. Locke it was donated by Violet Locke McIvor and renamed Mount Locke for her grandfather. The chosen site, in the Davis Mountains, is located primarily on the cattle ranch of the pioneer settler G. ![]() The director of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, Otto Struve, Russian-born scion of a famous astronomical family, provided the telescope's concept and became the first director of McDonald Observatory in 1932. On completion the dome, seventy-one feet in height and sixty feet in diameter, was sheathed in metal and painted an aluminum color. Warner and Swasey also figured the main and secondary Pyrex mirrors from disks cast by Corning Glassworks of Bradford, Pennsylvania. Warner and Swasey, Incorporated, of Cleveland, Ohio, was awarded the contract for building the observatory, including the sixty-two-foot-diameter concrete and steel foundation built on solid rock and the mechanical parts of the eighty-two-inch telescope, then the second largest in the world. The university, having no astronomy faculty, signed a thirty-year collaborative agreement with the University of Chicago in 1932, whereby Texas financed the telescope and Chicago provided the astronomers. McDonald is said to have thought that an observatory would improve weather forecasting and therefore help farmers to plan their work. Initially his will was contested, but after protracted legal actions the university received $850,000 for the establishment of an astronomical observatory. It owes its foundation to the unexpected legacy of William Johnson McDonald, bachelor banker of Paris, Texas, who died on February 6, 1926, at the age of eighty-one. The McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas at Austin is located on Mount Locke, near Fort Davis.
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