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I visited the top of Mauna Kea a couple of months ago, as a tourist. It is a fascinating place, already so populated with telescopes that it is tough to imagine

I visited the top of Mauna Kea a couple of months ago, as a tourist. It is a fascinating place, already so populated with telescopes that it is tough to imagine how adding another (likely built more carefully than older ones) could cause grave damage, interference with other uses of the area, etc. On the other hand: some of the telescopes have been there many years and are probably somewhat obsolete by today's standards, producing little new science. Perhaps one of the existing structures could have been removed to make room for the TMT, to lessen conflict.

jlmorton 8y ago
> Perhaps one of the existing structures could have been removed to make room for the TMT, to lessen conflict. TMT project will in fact remove three old telescopes.
- kylecordes 8y ago
  Wow, great piece of info, seems very relevant to the dispute.
- lutorm 8y ago
  The Governor decided that three telescopes would come down. One of these is the tiny UH Hilo education telescope, so it's not really anything like the others. Many people think that this particular telescope, the only one whose purpose is directly aimed at educating the local astronomy students, should not be the one sacrificed on the altar of the TMT, especially since its local impact is practically zero.
starik36 8y ago
>> it is tough to imagine how adding another one could cause grave damage This issue was brought up on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast several years when the problem first surfaced. I think the problem the islanders have is there are so many telescopes on the island already. Adding another one is simply piling on, in their view.
- kylecordes 8y ago
  see the peer comment though. The thing I had asked about, was less than what is actually being done! It sounds like the project will actually result in a net reduction of two telescopes. Keeping that in mind, and the physics of the situation regarding elevation and atmosphere etcetera, it's tough to side with the protesters on this specific dispute.
joshvm 8y ago
>On the other hand: some of the telescopes have been there many years and are probably somewhat obsolete by today's standards, producing little new science. I can assure you most of those telescopes are still being used for new science. There is a serious lack of "big" telescopes, globally. We simply don't have enough instruments to follow up everything we want to look at, and getting time on these "old" instruments is still competitive. A big part of this is location: Mauna Kea has fantastic skies and is good for things like IR astronomy as a result of its elevation. Telescope optics are fairly simple. They're a bunch of mirrors which focus light in one place - a 2m mirror is a 2m mirror. The main maintenance task is cleaning or re-coating, which happens once in a while. While larger telescopes really need adaptive optics to fulfill their potential, you don't need it unless you need to resolve tiny objects in crowded fields.* One good use for these smaller telescopes is long observations, or repeat observations. Time domain astronomy is a Big Thing at the moment, and for a lot of objects you don't need a 30 metre mirror (the main benefit of which is seeing extremely faint stuff). Another use is follow-up work, which is rather mundane, but necessary. For example you get a bunch of targets back from a sky survey and you want to observe them all for a period of time. Doing that on something like the TMT or ELT would be a fantastic waste of resources. Usually you would need to prove, using a smaller telescope, that it would be worth pointing a O(10m) mirror at it. What often changes is the instrumentation: lower noise or higher resolution CCDs, fancier spectrographs, etc. These can all be retrofitted to fit onto older telescopes. * more specifically, if you want to do diffraction-limited imaging and your telescope can theoretically resolve better than atmospheric seeing.

jlmorton 8y ago

> Perhaps one of the existing structures could have been removed to make room for the TMT, to lessen conflict. TMT project will in fact remove three old telescopes.

kylecordes 8y ago
Wow, great piece of info, seems very relevant to the dispute.
lutorm 8y ago
The Governor decided that three telescopes would come down. One of these is the tiny UH Hilo education telescope, so it's not really anything like the others. Many people think that this particular telescope, the only one whose purpose is directly aimed at educating the local astronomy students, should not be the one sacrificed on the altar of the TMT, especially since its local impact is practically zero.

starik36 8y ago

>> it is tough to imagine how adding another one could cause grave damage This issue was brought up on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast several years when the problem first surfaced. I think the problem the islanders have is there are so many telescopes on the island already. Adding another one is simply piling on, in their view.

kylecordes 8y ago
see the peer comment though. The thing I had asked about, was less than what is actually being done! It sounds like the project will actually result in a net reduction of two telescopes. Keeping that in mind, and the physics of the situation regarding elevation and atmosphere etcetera, it's tough to side with the protesters on this specific dispute.

joshvm 8y ago

>On the other hand: some of the telescopes have been there many years and are probably somewhat obsolete by today's standards, producing little new science. I can assure you most of those telescopes are still being used for new science. There is a serious lack of "big" telescopes, globally. We simply don't have enough instruments to follow up everything we want to look at, and getting time on these "old" instruments is still competitive. A big part of this is location: Mauna Kea has fantastic skies and is good for things like IR astronomy as a result of its elevation. Telescope optics are fairly simple. They're a bunch of mirrors which focus light in one place - a 2m mirror is a 2m mirror. The main maintenance task is cleaning or re-coating, which happens once in a while. While larger telescopes really need adaptive optics to fulfill their potential, you don't need it unless you need to resolve tiny objects in crowded fields.* One good use for these smaller telescopes is long observations, or repeat observations. Time domain astronomy is a Big Thing at the moment, and for a lot of objects you don't need a 30 metre mirror (the main benefit of which is seeing extremely faint stuff). Another use is follow-up work, which is rather mundane, but necessary. For example you get a bunch of targets back from a sky survey and you want to observe them all for a period of time. Doing that on something like the TMT or ELT would be a fantastic waste of resources. Usually you would need to prove, using a smaller telescope, that it would be worth pointing a O(10m) mirror at it. What often changes is the instrumentation: lower noise or higher resolution CCDs, fancier spectrographs, etc. These can all be retrofitted to fit onto older telescopes. * more specifically, if you want to do diffraction-limited imaging and your telescope can theoretically resolve better than atmospheric seeing.