Mc Donald Observatory

For the second time we went to Ft. Davis Texas to the McDonald Observatory this year. But this time we got look through the 107" Telescope. For $50 we got a nice brisket dinner, 2 presentations and got actually look at 2 objects. Only McDonald Observatory lets the public use their telescopes.
The 2 talks was very technical, I'm sure many did not understand. The first staff member did a overview of how 80% of space observations use refracting light (the rainbow color effect) to determine chemical makeup, speed, and distance of staller objects.
The second speaker was someone I thought I would never get to meet. He was a member of a team looking for planets around stars. McDonald Observatory is the main telescope doing this.
They have indirectly determined there are hundreds of Jupiter type planets out there. But so far their methods are not good enough to find earth like planets because they are too small. What they do is look for the star to wobble because of gravitational pulls. Even our sun wobbles because of Jupiter, which 5.2 times as far from the sun as we are.
I understood about 90% of what a heavily accented foreign speaker said.
Then we got 2 direct observations ourselves, 1 person at a time. The first was a star cluster 33,000 lights years away, stars about 4-5 billion years old. Maybe 100,000 stars together. Then we looked at a Nebula (cloud) of a exploded star 6,000 light years away. Way cool! Would never see them except through a large telescope.
Linda wants to buy a 107" telescope now.
Nice thing about this time of year is the sun sets much earlier and we got to leave just after 7 pm our time. Got home just after 10 pm in the car (too cold for bike). In Sept. we took the bike and got out at 9 pm and got home at 1 am.
Did not hit any suicide pigs and death defying deer. But see deer going to Ft. Davis in the day. We took the long way in, it is very scenic but dry there.
Was A Great day. Pic later