McDonald Observatory is honored to receive a grant from Permian Basin Area Foundation in support of the Observatory’s ongoing efforts to renovate exhibits at its Frank N. Bash Visitors Center. The exhibits are a meaningful part of the visitor experience, providing an opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of astronomy and the questions it’s trying to answer.

AUSTIN, Texas - The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory and other Giant Magellan Telescope partners today shared in announcing the casting of the final primary mirror for the world’s largest telescope.

BY EMILY HOWARD

The 2023 Board of Visitors Summer Meeting took place July 14-15 at McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas.

BY EMILY HOWARD

BY EMILY HOWARD

BY MARC AIRHART

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers racing to find some of the earliest galaxies ever glimpsed have now confirmed that a galaxy first detected last summer is in fact among the earliest ever found. The findings are in the journal Nature.

The Local Volume Mapper (LVM) Instrument has seen first science light. LVM is one of the three mappers that make up the fifth phase of the SDSS’s ambitious all-sky, multi-epoch spectroscopic survey. This new instrument will create a spectroscopic map of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies.

BY EMILY HOWARD

BY MARC AIRHART

Researchers have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed about 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole is less massive than any other yet identified in the early universe.