Mercury Appears in the Evening Sky

The planet Mercury is starting an evening apparition. The planet should become visible this week just above the fading glow of the setting Sun as a magnitude -1 object. The planet is moving about 1° further from the Sun and higher in the sunset each day, reaching a maximum elongation of 20° on December 28th.

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Hawaii Discovers: The World’s Leading Observatory Was Born in Hawaii 25 Years Ago

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

Twenty-five years ago in 1990, the average US house cost $123,000, the Dow Jones averaged 2633 and gasoline cost a little more than a dollar-thirty a gallon. Saturn wasn’t just a planet: it was now a newly launched car company from GM, The Simpsons was aired for the first time and the Space Shuttle Discovery placed the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit.

Kohala 5th Grade at Keck
The fifth grade class from Kohala Elementary reconstructed the Keck Observatory mirrors during the 25th anniversary of “First Light”, credit Andrew Hara / Ena Media Hawaii
And it was the beginning of a golden age for astronomers: a perfect trifecta of advances in electronic instrumentation, computing power, and engineering were assembling to produce a new generation of telescopes – one that would radically change the way we understood the cosmos and the forces that drive it.

Want Of Light

Before the W. M. Keck Observatory was built, the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory reigned supreme. It was the largest telescope in the world, but after 50 years, progress in astronomy was flattening out because the instruments needed more photons than the 5-meter mirror could provide.

The biggest hindrance to an explosion of discoveries was a want of light and the telescopes themselves were the problem. Mirrors larger than Palomar’s could not be made and supported at the exacting levels needed for astronomy.

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Horse & Cart

Horse-drawn transportation is quite common in Nicaragua. Everywhere we went horses were a common sight on the road. This was not only a feature of more rural areas, even in major cities you will encounter horse powered vehicles.

I found the use of horses for basic transport rather pleasant, though I only had a brief ride at one of the farms. With one or two exceptions, the horses looked well cared for and in excellent shape. The horse is still a practical and cost effective form of transportation in much of the world. I wonder if we in the US, under pressure from rising oil prices, will once again find the horse a practical form of transport as well.

Horesecart
A horsecart in the streets of Grenada, Nicaragua

Keck Celebrates 25 years Since First Light

W. M. Keck Observatory press release by Sean Adkins…

Every night, all over the world, people look up at the sky and wonder about the distant stars. Here in Hawaii we have the privilege of looking up at a very dark sky, but even here with the naked eye we can only see a few thousand stars. This is mainly because of the small size of the lens in our eye, which limits the amount of light it can gather, and also limits the detail we can see for those incredibly distant objects.

Keck 1 with Nine Segments
On November 24, 2015, Keck Observatory first observed the heavens above Maunakea, shooting Hawaii into the forefront of scientific research. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory
This week we will celebrate the 25th anniversary of first light on the Keck I telescope, an event that started the process that has made Hawaii today the best-known place on earth for scientific discovery in astronomy, and the Keck Observatory the home of the two most scientifically productive telescopes on earth.

First light, the first time light from the night sky is focused into an image by a telescope, is a very special event for the community of people required to build and use them, accompanied by a nearly mystical sensation as it culminates years of dedication to completing the project and bringing the Universe a little closer to all humankind.

Since the invention of the telescope 400 years ago, we have been looking at the sky in with much bigger manmade eyes, seeking to learn more and more about our Universe. This has been possible because we have been able to build larger and larger telescopes. For a time telescopes were developed with either lenses or mirrors, but the understanding of telescope design improved, telescopes using mirrors became the choice for larger telescopes. In 1977 the largest telescope on earth was the Hale telescope at Mount Palomar, with a mirror 5 meters in diameter. Astronomers at the University of California knew that their research was reaching the limit of what could be done with the Hale and smaller telescopes, and so they started a project to design and build a 10 meter telescope. This was a very ambitious goal, since even the Hale was known to have limited performance because of the tendency of its mirror to change shape as the telescope was pointed at different places in the sky.

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