McDonald Observatory’s public affairs specialist and veteran astronomer Bill Wren knows his stuff when it comes to looking out into the heavens, but it’s not as easy as looking through a telescope to gaze closer at the dots in the sky. You need a trained staff; great equipment, such as the Hobby-Eberly 10-meter telescope; and instrumentation that allows you to dig deeper into star composition. Clear skies also help.

MRT: What do you do when it’s raining?

BW: Look at satellite imagery that may give hope that there’s a clear spot coming.

We do public star parties three nights a week, where we look through telescopes for about 85,000 visitors each year. We’ll get 400, 500 people here on a rainy night, and we’ve got to get them something else to do because we can’t get them outdoors in the rain and lightning, so we have to work a lot harder then.

Sometimes the research astronomers who are clouded out will volunteer to come down and give a talk about their work.

MRT: How do you build a telescope like the Hobby-Eberly?

BW: It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. We have one of the largest astronomy departments in the world. You have a staff of hundreds — astrophysicists, mechanical engineers, optical engineers, electrical engineers, instrument builders — and you fabricate a new telescope. The Hobby-Eberly telescope was built for the measly sum of $13.5 million, about one-tenth the cost of what it would have taken to build the same sized telescope in a traditional way. It’s a very unique design that we used to lower the cost.

It’s nearing upgrade right now. We will be collecting tens of thousands of data points at night with this thing and generating tens of terabytes of data each night and sending it over the wire into storage facilities in Austin. Anyone with the internet will be able to access the data.

It’s an exciting time to be working here and be in astronomy, in general. We’re finding hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of exoplanets. We’re getting better and better at detecting smaller and smaller planets and earth-like planets. Yes, they’re out there.

When I came to work here 20 years ago, we didn’t know of any planets outside our solar system. Now we know of hundreds of thousands. There are thousands of candidates, but 700 have been confirmed. It’s safe to say every star out there has at least one planet going around it.

It’s exciting to consider worlds beyond what we have known since antiquity -- the possibilities of other life forms and intelligent civilizations. We know that life happens. And if the history of astronomy since Galileo looked through a telescope 400 years ago has taught us anything, it’s that we’re not at the center of things. We’re just the third planet from a minor star in a medium-sized galaxy out at the edge among countless other galaxies. It happened here; it’s likely happening all over the place.

MRT: What are your top three things to see through the telescope?

 BW: 1. Planet Saturn is hard to beat. The rings around Saturn through a good telescope just knock people’s socks off.

I’m fortunate enough to have been able to work some of these star parties that we have at the visitors center. We have a telescope that I helped design and build down there that I operate. To have 400, 500, 600 people come every night and look through this telescope, the reactions — “You can see the rings and everything!” Some people will just start laughing; they won’t say anything and just start giggling. It’s like a cartoon, a Walt Disney production.

Saturn has got to be a topper just because it’s so neat to look at because it’s so unreal. It is like a Walt Disney or Pixar production when you see it through a good telescope.

2. Globular star clusters, where you see hundreds of thousands, even millions, of stars clumped together, about 200 of which orbit around our Milky Way galaxy.

3. Other galaxies beyond the Milky Way. When I got out here, I got involved in searching for extragalactic supernova and discovered four.

MRT: There’s more to astronomy than just stargazing, right?

BW: About 125 years ago, most astronomers were saying we had probably reached the limit of what we can come to know and understand about distant stars. We can’t get up close to see what they’re made of; we can’t bring them down to analyze them.

Then we discovered that by making a nice image of a star and smearing it out with a prism to form a spectrum, we can analyze the spectrum and decipher the chemical and physical properties of the star. What is it made of? How hot is it? Is it rotating? How fast? How massive is it? We’ve come to understand that everything heavier than hydrogen and helium in the universe — the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones — all of those atoms were formed in stars that blew up long before the sun formed. That to me is just mind-boggling. It’s what makes astronomy and astrophysics a science and more than just a hobby of stargazing.

MRT: How popular are the observatory's star parties?

BW: Were out here in the Davis Mountains, and it’s absolutely beautiful. Like I said, about 85,000 a year are coming out here to see us; the star parties are awesome. We’ve really had to kind of put a lid on it because we can only handle so many people, so they’ve kind of gone to a reservation-only system. At the star party last night, there were only about 400 people allowed maximum for it, and we’re constantly topping off. You get 1,000 people for a star party and there’s only so many telescopes and staff to handle the crowd, nobody has a quality experience.

MRT: Now that Midland International Airport is also a spaceport, is it time to drop “international” and call itself “intergalactic”?

BW: I would love that!
