Astronomy center to feature 'real time' images
By Hugh Clark
Advertiser Big Island Bureau
HILO, Hawai'i — Real-time images from the star-gazing facilities atop Mauna Kea will be available to Big Island schoolchildren and other visitors when a $20 million astronomy center opens at the University of Hawai'i-Hilo Research and Technology Park.
When completed, the Mauna Kea Astronomy Education Center will have a high-tech planetarium, lecture halls and classrooms. The center, promoted several years ago by U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye, is still in its design phase and a construction timetable has not been set. The first $2.5 million for planning has been released through NASA and the Bishop Museum.
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To view the site plan check out the University of Hawai'i Mauna Kea site.
It will be built on a 10-acre site in the UHH Research and Technology Park upslope of the main campus. The park, established in 1992, already is home to the recently opened Hilo center for the UH Institute for Astronomy and four other base operations for observatories on Mauna Kea. A new addition will be the 16,000-square-foot headquarters for the Smithsonian telescope project, with groundbreaking set for next spring.
UHH Chancellor Rose Tseng yesterday announced that former physics and astronomy professor Walter Steiger and retired Vice Chancellor Edgar Torigoe will serve as interim co-directors of the education center.
Steiger began working for UH at Manoa in 1948 and came to the Big Island in 1987 as project manager of the Cal Tech Submillimeter Telescope. He served on the UH Board of Regents in 1982-86.
"We will have the best large (astronomy) images in real time," said Steiger of the education center's plan to provide visitors with the same scenes scientists are viewing simultaneously near the summit of Mauna Kea, about 25 miles away.
All 12 of the existing astronomy operations on Mauna Kea, representing a total investment of nearly $1 billion, will provide resource materials for the new center.
Steiger said a permanent center director will be chosen soon and that some Mainland applications have been received.
