Meyer Observatory Open House

Once a month, the Central Texas Astronomical Society hosts a public open house at the Paul and Jane Meyer Observatory at the Turner Research Station, a dark sky site just outside of Clifton, Texas. 

I honestly had no idea that there was an observatory in this part of the state!

My dad is really into astronomy as a hobby, and we were excited to go and check it out.

It wasn't too far from where my parents live, but it's still a long drive down a narrow, twisty, pitch-black country road to get to the Turner Research Station. We weren't even sure we were at the right place when we turned off the road and up a steep driveway into a densely wooded path. The only hint that we were headed the right direction was a reflective sign asking us to please dim our lights.

However, as we wound our way up a hill and came to a gravel parking lot, we found that we were indeed in the right place, and we could see the observatory silhouetted against the clear night sky up ahead.

Although only about 45 minutes outside of Waco, I was amazed at how dark the sky was and how many bright stars we could see.

We headed upstairs to a dark room in the observatory's dome. The huge telescope was already pointing up towards the sky. A member of the society was explaining to the roughly 25 people gathered together inside the observatory about how the telescope works.

He used a computer program to focus the telescope on various points of interest, and then we were each able to climb up a metal staircase to look through the viewfinder. It was super cool!

We got to look at Saturn, and could clearly see its rings, moons, and even faint clouds!

We also got to look at Jupiter, and I was impressed at how clearly we were able to see the dark stripes across its surface.

Finally, we had a look at the distant Andromeda Galaxy. Astronomically it's our closest neighbor, but it's still a full 2 million lightyears away, which is really hard to even comprehend.

It was chilly up in the observatory. On a crisp, cold winter night like this, the sky is really clear, and we were able to see tons of stars even when we weren't taking our turn to look through the telescope.

This was such a fun, new thing to do, and I was really glad to have discovered another cool thing to visit when I'm back home in Texas.