After nearly a decade of globetrotting research, a powerful astronomical instrument has returned home to The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory. The Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph (IGRINS) was re-installed on the Observatory’s Harlan J. Smith Telescope on October 17 and expects to start scientific operations on December 10.
Applications are open for McDonald Observatory teacher professional development workshops. K-12 teachers are invited to join us in summer 2025 for hands-on classroom activities, telescope tours, discussions with resident researchers, and nighttime observations. Check out our offerings and apply before February 12, 2025.
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope is a powerhouse of astronomical research. You can see it when you visit McDonald Observatory. And now, you can see it in Austin, Texas, too. A scale model of the telescope is featured in a new exhibit about it and its research. "Big Eye on Dark Skies: The Hobby-Eberly Telescope" is on view at Texas Science & Natural History Museum (formerly Texas Memorial Museum) now through spring 2025.
This fall, The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Astronomy welcomes the inaugural class of postdoctoral fellows to its Cosmic Frontier Center. The Frontier Fellows will support the center, which launched earlier this year, in its mission to uncover the origins of galaxies in the universe through a combination of theoretical and observational astrophysics.
The Giant Magellan Telescope, of which UT Austin is a founding partner, today announced the successful installation of one of its completed 27.6-foot-diameter (8.4-meter-diameter) primary mirrors into a support system prototype at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab. This highly sophisticated system — comparable in size to half a basketball court and containing three times the number of parts of a typical car — is vital to the telescope’s optical performance and precision control.
