Houston's telescopes

I travelled to Houston on company business and spent a couple of weekends there. One of those weekends, I visited the Brazos Bend State Park. While the park itself is a nice place to have a picnic and watch alligators, the observatory in the park had me really excited. The observatory has a three telescopes and a star gazing session each Saturday night. I had never been in an observatory before and I was looking forward to the night.

 

The night's session started with a slide show on the observatories telescopes and what we can expect to see that night. The turn out was excellent for a weekly event. There were a large number of kids with their parents. After the slideshow, we headed upstairs to the telescopes. All the area was lit with dim red lights. It had something to do with red not interfering with the telescopes functioning or night vision.

I spent the next couple hours like a kid in a candy store. I got a look through each of the three telescopes. The telescope in the central dome was huge. I just wonder how much engineering goes into building and controlling such a machine.

The really cool part was that a bunch of smaller telescopes were setup on the terrace. These were brought by astronomers/enthusiasts around Houston. There were different kinds of telescopes each covering a different section of the sky. One of them had a TV connected to it. This one was pointed at the moon and I could see the rough lunar surface like the back of my hand. I went around from telescope to telescope enjoying myself. Very knowledgeable people. All you had to do was show up at the telescope and they would patiently explain what the telescope is pointed at and answer all the questions. The evening completely excited my inner geek. Atleast one Saturday put to good use.