The Stars in Their Eyes is a portrait of the colorfully disparate, ever-changing cast of characters at the McDonald Observatory and in the surrounding communities in far West Texas, where people from all over the world converge for something wholly untouchable: the night sky. It’s also about the alarming loss of dark skies, declining ten percent worldwide every year. And about the challenge of older observatories like McDonald, so important for teaching, for attracting visitors, and for ongoing research, to remain relevant in an era of space-based telescopes and giant observatories being built in Chile. Will McDonald survive? And will the next generations ever see a sky full of stars in their lifetimes.
The film is being directed by Paul Stekler, a nationally known award-winning filmmaker and the former chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. All of his documentaries over four decades have been broadcast nationally on PBS. After the finished film airs, The Stars in Their Eyes will be given to McDonald Observatory for their use at their Frank N. Bash Visitors Center and online for observatory support.
The Stars in Their Eyes will spend a year at the McDonald Observatory, capturing the people who work in and visit this celestial place that’s home to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, one of the world’s largest, and is one of the world’s leading centers for astronomical research. The film will also be both a portrait of people at the observatory – staff, scientists, students and visitors -- along with placing it in the context of the surrounding communities in far West Texas high desert.
The film will interweave the stories of astronomers from the University of Texas and from around the world who make groundbreaking discoveries about the origins of the universe through the study of ancient light. It will include graduate astronomy students working on their doctorates; the student interns who lead visitor tours; maintenance workers who live on and around the mountain; kitchen workers at the astronomer’s lodge: craftspeople who clean the telescope mirrors; the public school teachers and students who attend summer workshops, and the thousands of visitors who sojourn to what feels like the middle of nowhere for a star party beneath one of the darkest night skies in the continental United States.
The film will feature astronomers like Dr. Keith Hawkins, a charismatic young professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in Galactic archaeology, exploring the formation, evolution, and structure of the Milky Way galaxy, while mentoring a new generation of young women astronomers studying the compositions of old stars.
Viewers will meet Anita and Bill Cochran, who have worked at McDonald for over forty years, studying comets and exo-planets, respectively, and spending long nights using the observatory’s oldest telescope, the Otto Struve. Then there’s staffers like Jimmy Crooks and Emily Mrozinski. Crooks is an onsite mechanic and Jack of all trades who drove by McDonald on his motorcycle and never left. Mrozinski is the crane operator in the Hobby-Eberly dome, charged with rearranging the telescope’s giant reflective mirrors for each night’s work. Her daily routine couldn’t be more different than that of the observatory’s Dark Skies coordinator Stephen Hummel, whose work takes place largely outside McDonald. His job: to minimize light pollution, so Hummel spends the bulk of his days in his pickup, driving around the vast expanse of west Texas, trying to convince folks in rural communities to change their outdoor lightening in a world where skies are losing 10% of their darkness every year. The Stars in Their Eyes will also introduce viewers to Rachel Fuechsl, who leads the McDonald’s infamous tri-weekly star parties, regaling rapt visitors with the science and mythology behind objects in the night sky.
The Stars in Their Eyes will also educate viewers on the observatory’s rich history of scientific achievements since the dedication of McDonald’s original 82-inch reflector telescope, the Otto Struve Telescope, in 1939 followed by the larger 107-inch Harlan J Smith Telescope in 1968, and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in 1997. These achievements include discovering an atmosphere on Saturn’s largest moon; calculating the precise distance between the earth and moon by bouncing a laser off a reflector left there by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, during the Apollo 11 landing; the invention of a system for measuring the color of stars; the creation of an instrument for high-speed photometry that revolutionized the of study white dwarf stars; and the discovery of the most powerful supernova to date.
The film is also about the West Texas context of ranchers and residents who love the high desert, the mountains and the vast spaces. Fort Davis, an actual frontier fort once manned by African-American Buffalo soldiers, is rich in history. Archeologists, like retired state archeologist Robert Mallouf, study the cosmological meanings of pictographs left on rock walls in the surrounding Davis Mountains, in ancient shrines built in the caves on the sides of canyon walls, and in caches of buried broken arrowheads found at the peak of Mt. Livermore, overlooking the observatory. There are the efforts at conservation of the land and ecology of this northern Chihuahuan Desert. There’s the contrast of nearby working class, college town Alpine, tourist and artist magnet Marfa, and Fort Davis. And there’s the threat of wildfires in a changing climate that have come close to McDonald.
