My second visit to McDonald Observatory was for a Special Viewing Night on the 107-inch Harlan J. Smith telescope. Generally this telescope is used to spectroscopy so they began our tour with a lesson on the subject. Afterwards we moved onto the scope itself and got a neat speech from one of the researchers. I wasn’t as lucky to get a small group for this viewing so we only got to see a few objects. The clouds also decided they didn’t want us to be using the telescope. The telescope itself was completed in 1968 with the assistance of NASA. It is still used to this day for active research and is still highly sought after.

While I enjoyed the experience I enjoyed the 82-inch much more. We looked at pretty much the same exact objects from both telescopes. Due to the 107s size you get a much smaller picture limiting what they can show you.