The Harlan J. Smith Telescope is a telescope located at the

McDonald Observatory McDonald Observatory is an astronomical observatory located near unincorporated community of Fort Davis in Jeff Davis County, Texas, United States. The facility is located on Mount Locke in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, with additional faci ...

, in

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

, in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

. This telescope is one of several research telescopes that are part of the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...

observatory perched on Mount Locke in the Davis Mountains of west Texas. The telescope was completed in 1968 with substantial

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

assistance, and is named after

Harlan James Smith Harlan James Smith (August 25, 1924 – October 17, 1991) was an American astronomer. He served as director of the University of Texas McDonald Observatory from 1963 to 1989, where, among other accomplishments, he initiated the construction of th ...

, the first Texas director of McDonald Observatory. Smith was the Observatory Director for 26 years.

Vandalism damage

The telescope was the victim of an act of

vandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The term ...

in February 1970. A newly hired worker suffered a mental breakdown and brought a hand gun into the observatory. After firing one shot at his supervisor, the worker then fired the remaining rounds into the Primary Mirror. The holes effectively reduced the telescope to the equivalent of a 106-inch telescope (or about 2.5 centimeters less), but did not affect the quality of the telescope's images, only the amount of light it can collect.

Observations

The telescope has been used to observe many things. Some achievements includes the stars BD +17° 3248 and

XO-1 XO-1 is a magnitude 11 G-type main-sequence star located approximately 536 light-years away in the constellation Corona Borealis. XO-1 has a mass and radius similar to the Sun. In 2006 the extrasolar planet XO-1b was discovered orbiting ...

Jorge Meléndez Jorge Meléndez Ramírez (April 15, 1871 – November 22, 1953), was born to Rafael Meléndez and Mercedes Ramírez (daughter of Norberto Ramírez). Married to Tula Mazzini, he had three children: Jorge (who died in his youth), María de los ...

of the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies an ...

and Iván Ramírez of the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

discovered the star HIP 56948 in 2007 using the Harlan J. Smith telescope at

. The Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph-W ( VIRUS-W) (an

integral field spectrograph Integral Field Spectrographs (IFS) combine spectrographic and imaging capabilities in the optical or infrared wavelength domains -from 0.32 μm to 24 μm- to get from a single exposure spatially resolved spectra in a bi-dimensional region. Develop ...

) was used to find in 2021 that the Leo 1 dwarf galaxy contains a super massive black hole.''A Nearby Dwarf Galaxy has a Surprisingly Massive Black Hole in its Heart''
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Contemporaries on commissioning

Four largest telescopes 1968:

References

Telescope Shot
Optical telescopes {{UTexas-stub

Vandalism damage

Observations

Contemporaries on commissioning

See also

References