If you missed the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, you’ll have to wait 20 years to see another one in the United States. It will be another 400 years before one returns to Central Texas. Turn to the night sky, however, and the planets, stars, and galaxies put on a dazzling show that can be viewed year-round.
Eagle Eye Observatory at Canyon of the Eagles Nature Park and Resort on Lake Buchanan is an ideal spot to see and absorb the magnificent night sky, although it’s not the only place where the stars prevail and astronomers set up shop. Dark Sky state parks like Inks Lake and Pedernales Falls offer periodic star parties hosted by the Austin Astronomical Society.
Canyon of the Eagles’ observatory has five telescopes of varying sizes and is open Thursday-Tuesday, weather permitting.
On a recent night at Eagle Eye Observatory, visitors peered through a 14-inch clear aperture Celestron 1400HD f/11 Reflector and a 12-inch aperture Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain f/10 Reflector to view Saturn and its rings, Jupiter and nine of its 95 moons, and a stellar nursery in the constellation Orion the Hunter.
If you follow with your naked eye the three brightly aligned stars that mark Orion’s belt to the tip of his sword, you will see a tiny cluster of what you’re told are celestial bodies but just looks like a bright blur.
Peer through one of the telescopes and you’ll see directly into the Great Orion Nebula, where clouds of dense dust are being compressed by gravity and slowly heated to form stars and solar systems much like ours.
Jim Sheets, one of two astronomers at the observatory, pulled the focus in close enough to see at least four of the five bright orbs that form The Trapezium, a cluster of about 1,000 young, hot stars in the nebula.
“You can watch as a star is born,” said Sheets, adding that the Great Orion Nebula is 1,500 light years away but still the closest large star-forming region to Earth. “You’re looking into the past when you see that.”
A light year measures how fast light travels in an Earth year: 6 trillion miles, or a 6 followed by 12 zeros. What you see today from a small building on a rise deep in the Texas Hill Country happened 1,500 years ago in a nebula 8.8179e+15 miles away.
The observatory has a fully retractable roof and is illuminated by soft red lights. The telescopes housed inside are all reflectors, which use mirrors to produce clear black-and-white images.
“It doesn’t look like the magazine images you see,” Sheets explained. “One photograph can take a whole night to shoot and then has to be compressed with computer software.”
Fellow astronomer Phil Ostroff handles Eagle Eye sessions on Mondays and Tuesdays. He is also a professional photographer/astrophotographer who began teaching classes at the observatory in March on how to photograph outer space.
“That’s a new initiative we are just kicking off,” Ostroff said. “While cameras are firing away, we’ll have an observatory session as well.”
Outside the observatory are numerous concrete pads for visitors who want to set up their own telescopes.
“The fun of real astronomy is to see how much you can squeak out of your telescope and recognize stuff,” Sheets said.
Either he or Ostroff is always on hand to help point your telescopic eye to the right place in the sky.
“The observatory is all about transferring a sense of wonder to the people who come in, hoping they leave with a sense of fascination, a bit of a wow factor,” Ostroff said. “I’m fascinated by all the stuff we don’t know. We know a lot, and we’ve come a long way, but for every answer, another 30 or 40 questions pop up. That’s the draw. That’s the fascination.”