No mirrors were harmed…

The Harlan J. Smith Telescope is a 107-inch (2.7 m) telescope located at the McDonald Observatory, in Texas, in the United States. This telescope is one of several research telescopes that are part of the University of Texas at Austin observatory perched on Mount Locke in the Davis Mountains of west Texas. 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-inch (2.7 m) 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.

Which, once again, proves that nothing good has ever come out of Texas.

The silvery orb is the reflection of a light in the room behind me… the ‘sky’ is the far wall of the cleanroom…

I am not sure what the survey instrumentation is for…

The mirrors are covered with black shields to protect them since they are facing upwards… you don’t want a dropped tool banging into them!

What gave it away was the guys in the clean suits, I figured they
were probably in a clean room, assembling a spacecraft (it didn’t
look like a biotech lab). When you gave the clue it clinched it.

The only thing that puzzled me were those gadgets on tripods looking
like theodolites or surveyor’s transits.