Mauna Kea - IRTF - Hawaii Pictures

One of the things I've done as an electrical engineering consultant is to design and build drive and data acquisition systems for many of the infrared cameras and spectrometers used by astronomers around the world. So every now and then I get invited to go on an observing run with one of the groups using my equipment. Right now I'm on Mauna Kea with a team of astronomers from NASA Goddard who are using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) to study carbon chemistry on Jupiter.

Mauna Kea is on the island of Hawaii, usually just called the Big Island. The top of Mauna Kea, at 13,800 feet, is anything but tropical. It snows here during the winter, and nighttime temperatures even in the summer are around freezing. We've been watching the last little snow patch at the summit melt over the past few days, but it's lasted into July!


After I landed in Hilo we had to kill a couple of hours waiting for another team member to arrive, so we went down to Hilo Bay. It was packed with locals watching traditional Hawaiian canoe races. There were lots of fiberglass canoes on shore, but it looked like they only used hand-made wooden canoes for racing. Beautiful boats! The picture below shows one of the racing canoes being loaded on a trailer.




You can see several of the Mauna Kea telescopes peaking above the clouds in this picture which I took from Hilo Bay. The distance to Mauna Kea's summit is about 25 miles horizontally and three miles vertically. Click on any of these pictures to see full size versions.



This is Hale Pohaku (Stone House), the dorms and support buildings for the Mauna Kea observatories, as seen from the top of a nearby pu'u (hill or cinder cone) which I climbed. This cone may be Pu'ukalepeamoa, but I'm not sure. I stayed in dorm B, which is the smaller building just to the right and above the main building. The dorm rooms are spartan, but they have private baths, and you don't spend much time in them anyway. Hale Pohaku is at 9300 feet, which is a fairly comfortable altitude, although you certainly notice it if you climb a steep pu'u. The main building has offices, a cafeteria, rec rooms, and the laundry. The road up to Hale Pohaku is paved, but most of the road to the summit isn't.


This is the pu'u that I climbed to take the picture of Hale Pohaku. It's a few hundred feet tall. I took this picture shortly after sunrise, and it really is that red. There are around a hundred pu'us on Mauna Kea, and this one is fairly typical of those at higher altitudes where there isn't a lot of plant cover.


This is the view looking southeast from the top of the pu'u. The road to Hale Pohaku is on the left, and the eastern slope of Mauna Loa is visible above the clouds on the right. Eight or nine other pu'us are visible, and each was an active volcanic cone at some time.