Tag: telescope

Another Peek into CFHT

Upgrades. With 20 year old systems upgrading and replacing old gear is a constant job. It is even worse over at CFHT, their facility is quite a bit older than ours at Keck. Does this mean the telescope is obsolete? No way. most systems have been constantly updated with new technology. But it does take quite a bit of work…

Canada France Hawaii Telescope Upgraded TCS testing from CFHT on Vimeo.

A Peek into CFHT

What do we really spend our days doing on the mountain? Usually pretty mundane stuff, just fixing stuff and making improvements to the gear. A little peek into one of those improvements over at CFHT, a fiber run to allow the 8 meter Gemini telescope to feed a spectrograph next door at CFHT. Something not so mundane, rather fun actually…

Canada France Hawaii Telescope Graces Fiber Link with Gemini Telescope from CFHT on Vimeo.

Perspectives on the Future of Mauna Kea

A lot of emotion and bandwidth has been swirling around our mountain this past month. It has been unfortunate that two otherwise positive forces have collided atop one summit. Last night the local community had a chance to listen to various perspectives in a more personal and reasoned forum. The Honokaʻa Peoples Theater, located on the slopes of Mauna Kea is the perfect place for this to happen. An evening of face to face discussion.

Hāwane Rios
Hāwane Rios addresses the audience at the Honokaʻa People’s Theater
While the issues surrounding Mauna Kea have captured international attention, this conversation was all the more powerful as it was limited to those of us who live and work on this mountain, many from families who have lived for generations in the mountain’s shadow. The conversation was all the more impressive in that it was conducted in the full spirit of aloha… There was no yelling, no waving signs, just respectful listening.

The format was simple, a presentation by Hāwane Rios, explaining her perspective on growing up in the traditions of Mauna Kea. This was followed by a presentation by Doug Simons, executive director of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. After a 15 minute intermission there was another hour of panel discussion with questions provided by the audience. What started at 6pm went on until well after nine, with personal conversations that kept the theater a buzz until well after 11pm.

Unfortunately one of the featured speakers Lanakila Mangauli was unable to attend, having flown to Oahu for a hasty meeting with OHA and state officials. He was not completely absent, a Skype connection projected on the theater screen allowed him to give a short presentation at the start. After having watched video of his tirade (Yes, I will call it that!) at the TMT groundbreaking ceremony, I had been given a somewhat less than flattering opinion of him. The person who addressed the audience this night was much more impressive, giving an intelligent and reasoned argument to his cause. I wish he had been able to address the audience in person.

Panel Discussion
Doug Simons, Hāwane Rios, and Ruth Aloua participate in Perspectives on the Future of Mauna Kea, Apr 24th, 2015
Thus it was up to Hāwane Rios to present the traditional and cultural perspective, a role she filled spectacularly well. She relater her personal relationship with the mountain, whom she considers part of her family. Impressing upon the audience the importance of place, the importance of continuity to the culture. Her discussion was interspersed with song, chants composed in traditional form and a notable song with a more modern flair. I could attempt to describe her presentation further, but I do it no justice, I suggest you watch the video.

Doug Simons also related his personal connection to the mountain, having spent the last 30 years working, hunting and raising his family here in Waimea and on Mauna Kea. Starting with the great discoveries that have been accomplished by the telescopes atop Mauna Kea, Doug did an admirable job of covering the importance of the research done at the telescopes and why these great instruments belong to all of mankind.

Technical Crew
A plethora of computers illuminate the technical crew at Perspectives on the Future of Mauna Kea
The question and answer went smoothly, no real surprises in the questions or the answers. Asked of the future of the telescopes Doug reflected that there will probably be fewer telescopes in the future, but that those should be the best in the world, nothing else is worthy of Mauna Kea. Asked about her personal vision of the future of the summit Hāwane asked for nothing less that the dismantling of all of the telescopes.

I spent the evening listening and operating a production video camera we had brought over from Keck. CFHT, Subaru and Keck staff operated a battery of audio/visual gear, live casting the event on YouTube, recording video for later editing and managing a Skype connection for Lanakila. I expect we should have good videos up shortly, they are definitely worth watching by anyone interested in the issues surrounding our mountain. The presentation by Hāwane should be worth watching just to hear her sing. I will put the links here as soon as they become available.

Update… Check out the video here.

Citizen Scientists Lead Astronomers to Mystery Objects in Space

NASA/JPL press release…

Sometimes it takes a village to find new and unusual objects in space. Volunteers scanning tens of thousands of starry images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, using the Web-based Milky Way Project, recently stumbled upon a new class of curiosities that had gone largely unrecognized before: yellow balls. The rounded features are not actually yellow — they just appear that way in the infrared, color-assigned Spitzer images.

The center of our Milky Way Galaxy taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The center of our Milky Way Galaxy taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“The volunteers started chatting about the yellow balls they kept seeing in the images of our galaxy, and this brought the features to our attention,” said Grace Wolf-Chase of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. A colorful, 122-foot (37-meter) Spitzer mosaic of the Milky Way hangs at the planetarium, showcasing our galaxy’s bubbling brew of stars. The yellow balls in this mosaic appear small but are actually several hundred to thousands of times the size of our solar system.

“With prompting by the volunteers, we analyzed the yellow balls and figured out that they are a new way to detect the early stages of massive star formation,” said Charles Kerton of Iowa State University, Ames. “The simple question of ‘Hmm, what’s that?’ led us to this discovery.” Kerton is lead author, and Wolf-Chase a co-author, of a new study on the findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Milky Way Project is one of many so-called citizen scientist projects making up the Zooniverse website, which relies on crowdsourcing to help process scientific data. So far, more than 70 scientific papers have resulted from volunteers using Zooniverse, four of which are tied to the Milky Way Project. In 2009, volunteers using a Zooniverse project called Galaxy Zoo began chatting about unusual objects they dubbed “green peas.” Their efforts led to the discovery of a class of compact galaxies that churned out extreme numbers of stars.

Continue reading “Citizen Scientists Lead Astronomers to Mystery Objects in Space”

The List

I usually have a list of things that need done on the summit. Mostly manini things, stuff that takes a few minutes, or maybe an hour. Not enough to justify a day on the summit, this stuff can usually wait for a week or two, until I find time. When a more serious issue takes me to the summit, something that must be done, it may take an hour, or half a day. When the main thing is done I always have the list to fill in the remainder of the day.

Summit To Do List
The list of things to do on the summit.
There were three things on the list, one that had to get done. No problem, I will be on the summit tomorrow. A phone call added another item to the list. A co-worker stopping by my desk with a favor to ask… One more item added. When the end of the day was finally upon me, the list had grown to ten items. It usually works that way.

A small yellow-lined piece of paper pulled from a pad, a scrap that would rule my day on the summit. I slip the list into my left breast pocket beside a black ball-point pen.

Attach a data logger to the K2 shutter drive controllers and move the top shutters. The data looks… Ummm… interesting. That will wait for another day to analyse. The shutters have been faulting out a bit lately, there is something wrong with the VFD drives, but I am not sure what. Hopefully the answer is in the data. Much of the morning is consumed with getting the test done.

Align the WYKO interferometer under the AO bench… No problem, takes five minutes… After I gown up to enter the AO enclosure. I can replace the wave front camera controller while I am in there, just swapping the unit with the controller from the development lab at headquarters. Alignment complete, nice fringes on the video monitor… Sam will be happy with that.

Time for lunch and a game of cribbage, a busy day makes this break all that much more enjoyable, It is a fun game, even if we do lose. We do not keep score, we play for fun and bragging rights for the day. All is forgotten a day later, with years of experience the skill level is pretty even and everyone takes a turn winning or losing.

A tour at 1pm, some family friends from Portland getting a tour of the telescope, always fun. A meeting at 3pm… I forget what for now… It must have been terribly important. The day was just a mite hectic, hurrying from task to task. Slowly the list dwindled as I cross off items.

As we headed down the mountain, I pulled the now well tattered list from my pocket. Not complete, a couple items will wait for another day. But still… A sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment. None of these tasks were of major importance, none would stop the telescope from going on-sky that night, just the routine minutiae of keeping the telescopes operating.