Friday, February 17, 2012

Astronomy

Keck in Motion from Andrew Cooper on Vimeo.


In 1998 my local engineering group organized a full day long tour of the Keck Observatory. We started in Waimea at their ground facility offices and talked about cosmology, toured the labs, and computer center. From there we drove 30 miles or so to the mid-level center at 9,000 ft MSL, had lunch, and acclimated to the altitude for a couple of hours before heading up to the summit of Mauna Kea where we spent the rest of the afternoon going through the observatory itself.

They do amazing work up there every day, and many if not most of the discoveries of the universe you hear and read about are made by the people who use this world class pair of telescopes.

Cudos to Andrew Cooper of www.DarkerView.com for putting this together. His blog link is on the right side of this page. He's always got good stuff like this.

2 comments:

  1. Once again you found a really neat video Dave! Do you know, were they changing "the glass" in there? Sure was slick what ever was going on! Thanks for sharing this!

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  2. Keck is fully outfitted to do almost everything they need to do to clean and resurface the mirrors on their telescopes. The level of science that happens at all astronomical observatories is pretty amazing.

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