Come watch the skies: The Valley's only observatory opens tonight

The heavens will open up to the Rio Grande Valley tonight.

After more than 10 years in the works, the only observatory in the area will make its debut at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.

"An Evening under the Stars" will take place at the Nompuewenu Observatory near the old Fort Brown grounds to celebrate its inauguration. The 7 p.m. event will include space activities, science experiment performances and stargazing from the dome’s 16-inch telescope and from smaller telescopes set up in the surrounding field.

"I think it is going to inspire the upcoming generations into the field of astronomy," said observatory manager Luisa F. Sambrano, who on Wednesday evening was cleaning the telescope’s large lenses in preparation for the event.

The observatory was created under the auspices of the university’s Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy and was named Nompuewenu at the suggestion of the project’s mastermind Mario Diaz, the center’s director and a physics and astronomy professor at the university. Nompuewenu means "beyond the sky" in Mapuche, the native language of northern Argentina where Diaz’s grandmother was born.

Nompuewenu has so far cost a quarter of a million dollars in multiple endowments from UTB-TSC, NASA and various nonprofit foundations — but Diaz credits his students with its successful completion.

The observatory’s fiberglass dome arrived in pieces from an Australian manufacturer during the summer of 2006, Sambrano explained, and students helped put it together "like a puzzle."

The task required hours of physical labor — a challenge for students used to calculating observation perimeters rather than construction work and who were juggling full class loads, exams and theses.

"We were out there from 7a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Friday, sometimes all the way to Saturday," said Antonio Galan, an electrical engineering student at UTB-TSC. "There were moments when we thought we were never going to finish."

Hauling the massive parts across the UTB-TSC campus and building the structure took nearly a year for Diaz and about seven students to complete, said Guillermo A. Valdes, who received a master’s in physics from the university last year. Valdes and Galan worked on the construction from beginning to end, they said.

Then the group had to install the 16-inch telescope, buy new equipment, program and tune the instruments and learn how to use the technology.

"It is like our baby," Valdes said. "This is by far the largest challenge we have ever undertaken."

And it feels gratifying to have worked on a project that will serve the entire Valley, students said. The observatory will provide students with a space to further study variable stars and gravitational waves, and will attract students from across the country to participate in summer research programs.

"We also want it to be a scientific instrument at the service of the community," Diaz added. The only other observatory in the Valley was at University of Texas-Pan American but closed in the 1960s.

Nompuewenu’s opens with good timing, the center director said, because it brings to a close the International Year of Astronomy, which commemorates the 400

th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s first use of a telescope to study the skies.

"Four hundred years ago Galileo pointed a telescope to the sky for the first time," Diaz said. "I am excited for tomorrow, but I am also excited for the future."

What: Debut of the only astronomical observatory in the Rio Grande Valley; the celebration will include space activities, science experiment performances and stargazing.

Where: The Nompuewenu Observatory near the old Fort Brown grounds, 467 Ringgold across from the Texas Army National Guard armory.

When: 7 p.m. tonight

Cost: Free