Harlan J. Smith Telescope

This telescope is one of several research telescopes that are part of the University of Texas at Austin observatory perched on Mount Locke in the Davis Mountains of west Texas.

The telescope was completed in 1968 with substantial NASA assistance, and is named after Harlan James Smith, the first Texas director of McDonald Observatory.

[1] A newly hired worker suffered a mental breakdown and brought a hand gun into the observatory.

Jorge Meléndez of the Australian National University and Iván Ramírez of the University of Texas at Austin discovered the star HIP 56948 in 2007 using the telescope.

[6] The Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph-W (VIRUS-W), an integral field spectrograph, was used in 2021 to find that the Leo 1 dwarf galaxy contains a supermassive black hole.

Dome at dusk
The 2.7-meter Harlan J. Smith Telescope of the McDonald Observatory (US) is used to point a laser beam to a reflector stationed on the surface of the Moon.