We drove over and up to the Maunea Kea Observatory and Visitors Center. The Visitors Center is located at 9,200 feet above sea level and the research telescopes are another 4,000 or so feet up. Unless you just want to say you've been to the summit or you're a Nobel Prize winning astronomer or physicist with access to the telescopes the viewing at the visitors center is supposed to be better. This has something to do with the less oxygen at the top and a few other factors that they rattled off but were over my head. There are 13 of the worlds largest and most powerful telescopes located at the summit. The concentration is so high because given the height and lack of light pollution it is the best star gazing location on earth for both amateurs and professionals.
Speaking of what was overhead, just by luck it happened to be a moonless night which made for excellent viewing conditions. With the unaided eye we had a great look at Venus and Mars and with their telescopes we saw Saturn and it's rings. The Milky Way was easily visible as well as a number of unmanned satellites. The coolest two things to me was catching a glimpse of the space station which passes overhead about every hour and a half as well as using a telescope to see the Andromeda Galaxy. This galaxy is the next closest to the Milky Way and is only a mere 2.5 million light years from earth. Now I'm not going to do the math but according to Wikipedia light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. That little fuzzy blob I was seeing in the telescope was a long way away and it's mind boggling to try to comprehend.
The staff at the visitors center were amazing and were spewing off facts (well, I wasn't going to dispute them) at about the speed of light. The nearest star is 35 light years away, there are over 100 billion planets in our galaxy and another 200 to 400 billion stars. After a while I found it was better just to take a deep breath and look up into an amazing night sky on an amazing night. There is intelligent life out there somewhere.............hopefully there is still a little left around here.
Oh what a night! Today it's on to Kauai.
I'll get this picture thing figured out one of these days.
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| Telescopes at the top of Maunea Kea-photo from web |
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| Above the Clouds-Maunea Kea Observatory |
