In order to get time on one of the Keck telescopes, you have to
apply about 6 months to a year
in advance. When you go to Hawaii to observe, you actually do
the observing from Waimea, which
is a lovely town at the base of Mauna Kea, in the Kohala District at
an elevation of about 2,000
feet. It's hard for some people to get up to the summit, but
with computers, everything's connected
between the summit and the headquarters in Waimea. So the day
before our observations, I hitched a
ride to the summit for the day with one of the tech guys who commutes
daily up to the summit.
There are five volcanos on the Big Island of Hawaii. If you measure
from the base of the mountain, which
is actually underwater, then Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain on Earth.
If you were to weigh the
mountains on Earth, then Mauna Loa is actually the most massive mountain
on Earth. It last erupted
in the 80's. Man, the 80's were great - wake me up before you
go-go, indeed! Kilauea, one of the
other volcanos on the Big Island, is currently erupting on the southern
portion of the island, and you
can see the lava flowing into the sea. I'm saving that part of
the island for my next trip to Hawaii.
So when you're going to the summit of a 14,000 foot mountain, it's not
exactly paved the whole way.
This is what it looked like as we drove up in our 4WD Jeep on the partially
graded road. A very nice man
named Mike took me to the summit - he works up there and was very patient
while I bugged him with
lots of annoying questions about lava, the telescopes and Hawaii.
As you drive up and you get to the summit of the volcano, (whose summit,
incidentally, looks just like I think
the surface of Mars probably looks),you turn a corner (the road is
all switchbacks and stuff) and VOILA!
there's a bunch of wicked, wicked big telescopes just sitting up there.
And you can't even see Keck yet!
Oh, also the road is paved again once you get up near the telescopes.
Local lore says they left the part of the
road between 9,000 and 12,000 feet unpaved because they don't want
random people going up there. The unpaved
part is also why you need a 4WD vehicle to get up to the summit.
This is cool - when you're at 14,000 feet, you're above about 90% of
the atmosphere. You can't
breathe very well, you feel dizzy, you're freezing cold and thinking
"this is Hawaii?!" and then you
look up and see that you're above most of the clouds.
That's just wicked awesome, in my opinion. That little
white thing on the volcano in the bottom left corner of the picture
is the 10-story-tall, 25m-diameter VLBA
antenna. Yeah, you know you're a nerd when you start jumping
up and down because you're so excited
to see the westernmost VLBA antenna. So now I've see something
like 8 out of the 10 antennas, too.
So once I'd been up on Mauna Kea long enough that I wasn't dizzy anymore,
this very nice man named
Bob took me on a tour of Keck. The Keck Observatory is made of
two identical 10-meter telescopes
called Keck I and Keck II, which means each telescope's main mirror
is 10 meters (about 30 feet) in
diameter. That is a very, very large area to keep perfectly reflective
(any impurities in the surface of the
mirror will negatively affect observations), so they actually use a
"honeycomb" structure made by
taking smaller, hexagonal mirrors and fitting them together.
If you look closely at this picture, you can see
the honeycomb structure. You can also see me and Bob standing
there. This, by the way, is Keck II.
So this is what the telescopes look like on the outside. It was
cloudy the entire time we were at
the summit, but luckily it cleared up and was perfect weather by the
time our observations started
the next evening. Anyway, so this is the dome of Keck II, and
the big area between the catwalks on
actually is the dome shutter, which is like a giant garage door.
They also keep it incredibly cold
inside the domes of the Kecks because that's better for the electronics
and computers, plus that
way when they open the dome at night, the temperature of the telescope
is very close to
the outside temperature.
This is what Keck looks like from the outside. The building separating
the two telescopes is where the
Keck interferometer is -- this synthesizes the signal from the two
telescopes to get an even better signal
with higher resolution (better detail). Keck I is on the left
and Keck II is on the right. The telescope to
the left of Keck I is Subaru, the national telescope of Japan.
Subaru is not named after the car company,
but "Subaru" is the Japanese word for the constellation we call the
Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters.