Why telescope on mountain

Mauna Kea "White Mountain" is a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii, the largest and southernmost of the Hawaiian Islands. It is located about km miles from Honolulu, which lies on the island of Oahu. The highest point in the Pacific Basin, and the highest island-mountain in the world, Mauna Kea rises 9, meters 32, ft from the ocean floor to an altitude of 4, meters 13, ft above sea level, which places its summit above 40 percent of the Earth's atmosphere.

The broad volcanic landscape of the summit area is made up of cinder cones on a lava plateau. The lower slopes of Mauna Kea are popular for hunting, hiking, sightseeing, and bird watching in an environment that is less hostile than the barren summit area. Mauna Kea is unique as an astronomical observing site. Data from the Webb telescope can be combined with information from other Earth-based telescopes to compensate for the infrared advantage that Mauna Kea has over La Palma, Mather said.

Mather is also working on a longer-term solution to the problem of seeing Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars, which he likened to seeing a "firefly next to a spotlight. It's a large "star shade" that would be launched far into space and positioned to block bright stars while allowing telescopes on Earth to see the planets orbiting them.

Those advancements could level the playing field between places such as Mauna Kea and La Palma, said astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who chairs Harvard University's astronomy department. Loeb agreed that Mauna Kea is a slightly better location for infrared observations. But La Palma is "an excellent site, so there would be exceptional science done there," he added.

The Native Hawaiian opponents call themselves "protectors" of Mauna Kea and aren't concerned about their mountain's advantages for astronomers. They just want the telescope group to abandon Hawaii. That would "be a win for everyone," said protest leader Kealoha Pisciotta shortly after Thirty Meter Telescope officials announced they would move forward with a building permit application for the La Palma site a few weeks ago.

Observatories can be found in remote areas all over the world, from the outback of New Zealand to the desert peaks of Uzbekistan. The other main obstacle to visual observation of the sky is light refraction caused by the atmosphere. The air around our planet is constantly heating up and cooling down, rising and falling and swirling around, forming layers of different densities. Each layer acts like a lens, and as light passes from one of these layers to the next, the light gets bent, or "refracted," even if only a little.

The effect is similar to the way a straw in a glass of water will appear to be shifted sideways where it breaks the surface. In the atmosphere, the shift from one layer of air to the other isn't nearly that great, but the accumulation of many tiny shifts is enough to scatter the light and affect the sharpness of an observed image. Because of this effect, the way we see objects outside the atmosphere will always be slightly blurred.

Astronomers refer to the quality of their view as their "seeing": a place that has "good seeing" offers a less-distorted view than a place that has "bad seeing. The result is that there's a practical upper limit on how sharp any observation from earth can be. The best earthbound locations for optical telescopes, in fact, are on mountaintops in the middle of the ocean near the tropics, where temperature variations are small.

That's why, for instance, the Mauna Kea Observatory is situated on the summit of Mauna Kea, the "white mountain" on the island of Hawaii, and the Teide Observatory was built almost feet meters above Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Only relatively recently have we been able to travel into space, and the distance we have traveled is microscopic compared with the distances of the objects we were observing with telescopes. We are still a very long way from being able to visit other stars and galaxies to discover more about how they form, or to take measurements of a black hole from close quarters.

The need to minimize interference from the atmosphere and extract as much information as possible from the tiny amount of light available means that we need to put our telescopes in strange, exotic locations, like at the top of mountains or even the summits of dormant volcanoes. These remote locations minimize the twinkling, because the atmosphere is thinner in these spots. If a location is chosen carefully, we can also eliminate the glare from outdoor lights, which reflect off the atmosphere and give the sky an artificial brightness.

Air quality is important for good observations, because any particles in the air will reflect light and also make the sky glow. Finally, weather has a substantial impact on the quality of observations. Ideally, observatories should be located as high above the clouds as possible.

Taking all of these factors into consideration, it is a good idea to put an observatory in a remote place, away from cities and built-up areas, a few kilometers above sea level see Figure 1. Once the telescope is placed in an extremely high-quality location, the challenge becomes using this instrument effectively for scientific investigations.

Unlike telescopes that you might purchase to use from your home, very few astronomical observatories have eyepieces attached to their telescopes, and even fewer professional astronomers look through eyepieces to record measurements. Instead, many telescopes that look at visible light use charge coupled devices CCDs to capture light. CCDs are the devices inside all digital cameras that detect light particles. Attaching a high-quality digital camera to a telescope gives astronomers a reliable way of precisely measuring the amount of light being transmitted from an astronomical source.

By using colored filters with these cameras, astronomers can make measurements of how each astronomical target looks in different colors. Combining this with a knowledge of astrophysics allows astronomers to piece together what the object is and what processes are happening throughout the object's life. If you only have one telescope, you are at the mercy of the weather. Many observatories still require astronomers to be on site to operate them, which can be very frustrating if there is bad weather.

With carefully designed systems for monitoring things like the weather, sky conditions, telescope statuses, telescope telemetry , control over all mechanical and electrical aspects of the observatory, and connection of the observatory to the internet, most observatories can be made robotic and remotely operable.

These observatories still require a person to have remote control of every aspect of their operation, for example, opening the observatory dome, moving the telescope, and starting a camera exposure. The key, however, is that this person could be anywhere in the world controlling the telescope [ 1 ].