If you visit the Jesuit University of Guadalajara in Mexico, and you wander around its lovely campus, you might happen to look up at a certain building and say, “is that an observatory dome up there?” From the ground, it is hard to tell for sure.
So if your curiosity takes you inside the building and you start climbing steps, lots of steps, you might find your way into a little room, where you see another interesting set of steps, more like a ladder. And if you climb that set of steps, that ladder, you will indeed find yourself in a very nice observatory, looking at a nice-sized Meade LX Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. You are in the observatory of the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, or ITESO (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente).
I visited the ITESO observatory while I was there for their 2024 Semana de la Astronomía (Astronomy Week). Yes, that’s right, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara celebrates astronomy for an entire week! The Semana de la Astronomía is organized by ITESO Prof. Javier Zapata Romano and his students. I gave three talks there this year (and three talks at the 2023 Astronomy Week — click here for a post related to that visit to ITESO).
Another speaker this year was Juan Jorge Hermosillo Villalobos, whose talk “Miradas al cielo: la astronomia en el ITESO desde sus raices” covered the history of astronomy at ITESO and the efforts there to build an observatory. ITESO is not an old school. It was founded in 1957. Up until the 1980s, astronomy there was like astronomy in many places — any telescopic observing required hauling out a telescope and setting it up, like was done with this large refractor and Newtonian reflector that were used to observe the February 1979 solar eclipse (these images are photos of Villalobos’s presentation).
In the 1980s, astronomy enthusiasts at ITESO built an observatory with their own labor. As you can see in these photos, it had a brick base and a lightweight geodesic dome. But this structure was not used long before the university built the building and observatory that now stands.
One thing that is really remarkable about the ITESO observatory is how immaculately it is maintained. Take a look at the two photos below. Take a look at the photos above with the stairs. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an observatory that is more “shipshape and Bristol fashion”. Everything gleams. Everything is clean — even the concrete lip of the dome. (That dome by the way was constructed, welded together, onsite — Villalobos had photos.)
All of ITESO is like that. Everything is well cared for. There are trees on campus whose bases are surrounded by decorative pebbles, with each pebble set firmly into the ground, one by one, to form patterns around the trees.
The photos below show (top) Eleazar Benítez Núñez, who is in charge of the observatory facilities, and to the right of him Javier Zapata Romano; (middle) a rooftop view of the observatory; and (bottom) a closeup of the exterior of the dome, with Zapata Romano outside and Benítez Núñez inside.
This video shows the rotation of the dome, which is done manually (simply by pushing it), and the view outside the dome shutter.
Guadalajara is a rapidly growing city. In the early days of ITESO, the skies over the campus were probably pretty dark. The views of the heavens were probably pretty sweet. Now ITESO’s lovely observatory is stuck with more light-polluted skies. Such is the price of progress, it seems. Nevertheless, the observatory serves the university’s needs well. When I was there in 2023, I got to see students operating the telescope, and also an enormous line of students, going all the way down those multiple flights of stairs, waiting to climb that ladder and have a look through that Meade SCT.
