400 Years of the Telescope

Second day on the mountain began a bit more slowly than the previous day. Our first interview was not scheduled until 3pm, so we took most of the morning to catch up on sleep and e-mails and to also enjoy the fine cuisine of the Hale Pohaku dining services. During our extended morning, the crew trekked out around the Hale Pohaku base camp scouting the trails and seeking out some of the Hawaiian shrines that are located around the mountain. Mauna Kea is considered sacred to the native Hawaiians as an elder ancestor and the physical embodiment (or kinolau) of deities revered in Hawaiian culture and religion. Mauna Kea, it is said, is where the Sky and Earth separated to form the Great-Expanse-of-Space and the Heavenly realms. The summit of Mauna Kea is also home to close to a hundred archaeological sites and many traditional cultural properties eligible for listing in National Register of Historic Places. We have come to understand a little of why the Hawaiian people consider the mountain extremely sacred. When driving up to the summit each day, we are blown away by the view of the island at 10,000 and then 13,000 feet. Of course the dark, star filled sky reveal why the summit separates the Earth from the Heavenly realms.

Around 1pm, we began our ascent of the mountain, the six-mile ride to the summit of Mauna Kea. Our destinations today: the Twin Keck Telescopes and the Canadian-French-Hawaiian Telescope. As we approached the Keck facility, we scouted out some outdoor filming possibilities. We wanted to get an outdoor shot of the Keck domes to catch the spectacular view as well as try something we hadn’t done before for this program, an outdoor interview. We met Dr. Taft Armandroff, Director of the W.M. Keck Facility, at the front of the NASA telescope facility, right across the road from the Keck facility. We had seen him a few hours earlier in the Hale Pohaku dining area where we introduced ourselves to him as he was departing the hall to return to the facility. Dr. Armandroff spoke to us about the technical advances of having multiple telescopes at one site and even predicted the next wave of telescope technologies. Following the interview, we had about an hour to spare before we were to arrive at our second location for the day. We were lucky enough to be escorted by Laura Kinoshita of the Keck Observatory through the first of the two Keck domes. The large dome was full of exciting new technologies, including one “shed” that housed the imaging technology used to seek out planets around stars. We will return to the observatory on Monday afternoon to film some additional footage of the telescope movements and some equipment change outs.

We departed the Keck facility around 3:30pm and drove the half-mile up the hill to the CFH Telescope that is housed next to the Gemini Observatory, one of our stops yesterday. The CFH Telescope facility is a joint astronomical contribution combining the minds of Canada, France and Hawaii. The CFHT was the first large-scale telescope to be built atop Mauna Kea. The facility was built in the late 1970s and saw its first light in 1979. The reflecting telescope features a single 3.6-meter mirror, much like the Mayall Telescope on Kitt Peak. Our guide on this observatory tour was Dr. Christian Veillet, the Director of the CFHT, whom we interviewed and talked to about the history of astronomy in France and also at the CFHT on the summit. Our tours of these two facilities, though built in different astronomical eras, still work together towards the same goals. CFHT’s wide-field imaging data is used to help telescopes like the Keck telescopes to pinpoint areas of the sky that should be looked at in more detail. This joint effort exemplifies the camaraderie between institutions and research astronomers.