Harlan J. Smith Telescope

The telescope was completed in 1968 with substantial NASA assistance, and is named after Harlan James Smith, the first Texas director of McDonald Observatory. Smith was the Observatory Director for 26 years.

The telescope was the victim of an act of vandalism in February 1970. A newly hired worker suffered a mental breakdown and brought a hand gun into the observatory. After firing one shot at his supervisor, the worker then fired the remaining rounds into the Primary Mirror. The holes effectively reduced the 107 in telescope to the equivalent of a 106-inch telescope (or about 2.5 centimeters less), but did not affect the quality of the telescope's images, only the amount of light it can collect.

The telescope has been used to observe many things. Some achievements includes the stars BD+17°3248 and XO-1. Jorge Meléndez of the Australian National University and Iván Ramírez of the University of Texas at Austin used the telescope to discover that star HIP 56948 is a near twin of the Sun, based on a comparison of their chemical element abundances. 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.

Four largest telescopes 1968: • # — Name / Observatory — Image — Aperture — Altitude — First Light — Special advocate • 1 — Hale Telescope Palomar Observatory — — 200 inch 508 cm — 1713 m (5620 ft) — 1949 — Edwin Hubble • 2 — C. Donald Shane telescope Lick Observatory — — 120 inch 305 cm — 1283 m (4209 ft) — 1959 — Nicholas U. Mayall C. Donald Shane • 3 — Harlan J. Smith Telescope McDonald Observatory — — 107 in 270 cm — 2070 m (6791 ft) — 1968 — Harlan J. Smith • 4 — Shajn 2.6 m (Crimean 102 inch) Crimean Astrophysical Observatory — 102 in 260 cm — 600 m (1969 ft) — 1961