I remember reading somewhere that the primary advantage of Maunakea is the stability of the atmosphere at high altitude in mid-ocean. Unlike land, the ocean stays pretty much the same temperature day/night. Without the dramatic day/night thermal changes there is much less viewing turbulence than mountaintop sites on continents. Also prevailing airflow over the ocean is nearly laminar, unlike over land. For high resolution astronomy, the viewing at the Maunakea site is said to be the premier on the planet. Or so I have read by writers much more technically knowledgeable than me who have no stake in the politics of this situation.
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You can't fix Samsara.
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quote:
Originally posted by imagtek
I remember reading somewhere that the primary advantage of Maunakea is the stability of the atmosphere at high altitude in mid-ocean. Unlike land, the ocean stays pretty much the same temperature day/night. Without the dramatic day/night thermal changes there is much less viewing turbulence than mountaintop sites on continents. Also prevailing airflow over the ocean is nearly laminar, unlike over land. For high resolution astronomy, the viewing at the Maunakea site is said to be the premier on the planet. Or so I have read by writers much more technically knowledgeable than me who have no stake in the politics of this situation.
An interesting link I found that names the other sites considered and also includes data along the lines of what you mention above:
http://sitedata.tmt.org/docs/ResUpdateFeb08FinalRep.pdf
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There's a lot to #3 (infrastructure). Very few places in the world that are "above the clouds" are within 60-90 minutes of an airport, harbor, and town with major resources. I've been to the Atacama (where many of the major southern hemisphere telescopes are) on a couple of different occasions, and it is several hours from the closest airport (Calama), which is a tiny town and out in the middle of nowhere itself. The nearest town to the telescopes, San Pedro de Atacama, is a long drive from Calama and is a fraction the size of Hilo. For installing (and maintaining) something so large, with so many parts, having accessibility to the outside world is very important.
Furthermore, very few places above the clouds are accessible year-round because of weather. This has at least two sub-issues: one, the weather itself would interfere with viewing (hence, you want somewhere with little precipitation); two, if there is snow all around, getting to the telescopes will be logistically more difficult if not impossible. Mauna Kea, while it gets some snow, is hardly ever snowed out, unlike any other 13,000 peak in the Continental US. Accordingly, this limits the available locations to the tropics (23.5 degrees north and south of the equator), which includes Central America, northern South America, Central Africa, the southern Arabian peninsula, south India, and Southeast Asia/New Guinea. Of those places, there are exceedingly few where there are 13,000+ foot mountains near accessible cities.
This leads to the next point, and I'm not sure whether this falls under infrastructure, or is a separate reason. It's political stability. For places up above 13,000 feet in the geographic areas above, very few are in countries where people spending billions on a project would feel comfortable investing their money. I've hiked in some of the high peaks near the Rwanda/Uganda/DRC border, and there's no way anyone is going to put a telescope in one of those countries. Colombia has high peaks and is in the Northern Hemisphere, but again, not remotely politically stable. New Guinea has some tall peaks, but is not stable and not accessible either. Even with all the protests we've had in the last few months, Hawaii is - for the time being at least - "politically stable."
So really, at the end of the day, it's process of elimination for a number of practical reasons, and at the end of the day, Mauna Kea checks off all the boxes in the Northern Hemisphere, and nowhere else really does.
Leilani Estates, 2011 to Present
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For places up above 13,000 feet in the geographic areas above, very few are in countries where people spending billions on a project would feel comfortable investing their money.
Protestors are working on fixing that problem -- good job, we're now (more) comparable to a third-world country.
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I heard that Zippy's was built on sacred land. Is there a list of sacred land or do we make them up as we go along?
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Protesters here lob insults, lawsuits and maybe a few rocks. The other places they lob grenades and artillery.
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Is there a list of sacred land or do we make them up as we go along?
We should have that answer right after groundbreaking on the Pahoa Roundabout.
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The Mauna Kea Management Plan used a number of cultural advisors including Kumo Pono :
http://www.kumupono.com
http://www.malamamaunakea.org/uploads/ma...P_2009.PDF
most state & federally funded project utilizes cultural adivsrs as a partner in their plans, and any State/Fed project that would trigger an EIS would have cultural advisors used in the planning stages now-a-days
These advisors have expertise in cultural land use, as the advisors for environmental impacts have expertise in the environment and advisors on construction have that expertise. It is totally up to any project to weight the impacts and mitigate impacts as appropriate...'there is the rub' for some! & the OEQC has the obligation to consider all of the input...
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whenever i hear about the involvement of cultural advisors i find myself wondering about integrity and if an activist's agenda has crept it's way into the advising.
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Of course there are alternatives to Mauna Kea. The important question here should be, are alternatives to Mauna Kea good for Hawaii? Mauna Kea doesn't "belong" to anyone. Mauna Kea pre-dates humans, belongs to the Earth, and the discoveries made there belong to everybody on Earth. Everything else is religion, fences, politics, and bickering. The first humans who came here were explorers. They explored as much of the universe as they could, using canoes and guided by the stars. If they could come back and speak to us, I wonder if they would side with those who protest, or would they prefer to see the Mauna Kea they discovered used to further their explorations? I would like to think that being guided by the stars, they would want to explore them as well.
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