By day, every year over 40,000 visitors pour in. Across the Rio Grande, a hundred miles away, Mexican mountaineers use the white domes as landmarks. By night, perched almost 7,000 feet above the sleeping, earthbound world, astronomers probe the secrets of the night sky. This is the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, one of the world's largest university-operated astronomical installations.

Big and Bright: A History of the McDonald Observatory is the story of a remarkable collaboration between two major universities, one a prestigious private school, the other a growing southwestern state institution. The University of Chicago had astronomers, but its Yerkes Observatory was aging and underfunded; the University of Texas had money for an observatory but no working astronomer to staff it. Out of their mutual need, they formed a thirty-year compact for a joint venture. Unusual in its day, the Yerkes-McDonald connection presaged the future. In this arrangement, one can see some of the beginnings of today's consortium "big science."

Now the McDonald Observatory's early history can be put in proper perspective. Blessed with a gifted and driving founding director, the world's (then) second-largest telescope, and an isolation that permitted it to be virtually the only major astronomical observatory that continued operations throughout World War II, the staff of McDonald Observatory helped lay the foundations of modern astrophysics during the 1940s. For over a decade after the war, a lonely mountaintop in West Texas was the mecca that drew nearly all the most important astronomers from all over the world.

Based on personal reminiscences and archival material, as well as published historical sources, Big and Bright is one of the few histories of a major observatory, unique in its focus on the human side of the story.

The age of merely looking at the heavens, of mapping and cataloguing the positions of the stars down to fainter and fainter limits, is past. Throughout that long period the pace of astronomical discovery was necessarily very slow and for centuries it remained virtually static. The invention of the telescope and then the spectroscope brought about an acceleration in the rate of progress which has continued unabated to the present day. Scarcely a year now passes without some spectacular advance being made, so that today, with the co-operation of modern techniques in physics, chemistry, rocket technology and biology, many of the older notions have been completely overthrown and new ideas set up in their place. And now the rapidly developing techniques of rocket research have made it possible to carry astronomical instruments beyond the atmosphere which confines our visual and photographic observations to an extremely narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now we are able to view the universe in ultra-violet and infra-red light, and by X-rays and radio emissions which are otherwise almost completely absorbed by the atmosphere.

Each problem that is solved, however, only serves to present us with a host of others in increasing complexity. The boundaries are being pushed back steadily, it is true, but the realm of the partially understood and the totally unknown is still as great as ever, and it is with this vast no-man's-land of astronomy that this book is concerned. It deals, amongst other subjects, with astronomical instruments and their application, recent discoveries in the solar system, stellar evolution, the exploding stars, the galaxies, quasars, pulsars, the possibilities of extraterrestial life, relativity, etc. With this book as a guide, the reader cannot fail to experience some of the tremendous fascination of present-day astronomy and its innumerable unsolved problems.