Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
In 1963, the astronomer Gerard Kuiper hired a plane and flew above the clouds, to circle the summit of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii. He needed a mountain, and the first one he had seen here, Haleakala, disappointed—too much fog.
But Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the Pacific, stretched even closer toward space. The air around its cinder cone is dry and chill, the weather calm and constant. Kuiper convinced the governor of the state to help plow a rough road to the summit and then spent months collecting data about the quality of the light that shines there. In the end, he was convinced that Mauna Kea was “probably the best site in the world” for an astronomer, the perfect place to see “the moon, the planets, and the stars.” As he said at the dedication of the site—“It is a jewel!” By the end of the 1970s, four sophisticated telescopes would perch on the summit.There are now 13 telescopes on Mauna Kea, and the international consortium building a new behemoth instrument, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), plans to add another. The TMT group was convinced, just as Kuiper had been, that this would be the best site in the world for their project. They knew that it has “great cultural and archaeological significance to the local people,” but they went for it anyway. There were legal battles with locals who wanted protect the site’s heritage, but last week, after years of legal challenges and protests, the Hawaii Supreme Court approved the permit for the telescope’s construction.
When the TMT group set out to find a location for this unprecedented combination of optics and technology, it began by considering “all potentially interesting sites on Earth,” and ended up at perhaps the best known and most tested astronomical site on the planet. The same thing happened with another ambitious telescope project: The group building the Giant Magellan Telescope broke ground this summer at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, another of the world’s premiere astronomical sites. Of course, any billion-dollar project will want to choose the best location available. What is it about these select mountaintops that makes them so irresistible to astronomers?
It’s simple, in a way. Astronomers want to capture light, clean and clear, as it streams down to Earth from impossibly distant stars and planets and nebulae, and they want to do that as many nights as they can each year. There are some obvious factors that obstruct that goal. Light pollution from nearby human settlements makes it hard to see the faintest objects. Wind can rattle a telescope and affect its accuracy. Clouds get in the way, especially for telescopes that operate in the visible light spectrum in particular. Site selection begins with the places on Earth with the greatest number of cloudless nights in a year. But even that is not…
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