Alpine's SKY Club Visits Hawaii
 
April 15, 2007
Prof. Jimmy Westlake
Ask sixteen members of the Alpine Campus’ SKY Club what they did over their spring break and you’ll hear a story about standing on top of the world’s biggest mountain with the world’s largest astronomical telescopes. Astronomy professor Jimmy Westlake and his wife Linda led the group of students, faculty and staff on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Big Island of Hawaii to tour the telescopes atop Mauna Kea, from base to top, the tallest mountain on Earth.
Plans for this trip to visit the Big Island began over a year ago. The SKY Club has already visited and observed with the telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Large Binocular Telescope atop Mt. Graham, both near Tucson, Arizona, as well as the McDonald Observatory near Ft. Davis, Texas, the Very Large Array of Radio Telescopes near Socorro, New Mexico, the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, Mt. Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California, and Mt. Palomar Observatory near Oceanside, California. Standing on the beach at Oceanside, California last spring, Jimmy and the SKY Cluber’s gazed longingly across the Pacific Ocean and dreamed of traveling to Hawaii to see the world’s largest telescopes. They vowed then and there to make that dream come true.
The timing for making the trip to Hawaii couldn’t have been better. Former Alpine Campus student and SKY Club president Larry Gray is in Hawaii now, finishing up his degree in astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. With Larry’s invaluable assistance as the “inside man,” the plans for the Hawaii trip began to jell. To raise money for the expensive trip, the SKY Club had two major fund-raising events, the “8th Annual Screamboat Chamber of Horror” haunted house last October and a raffle this spring for a large framed and signed astrophotograph donated by award-winning astrophotographer, Jimmy Westlake. With some additional funds provided by the Alpine Campus SGA, the SKY Club achieved their goal of raising $10,000 for the trip.
When the UHH Institute for Astronomy heard that Professor Jimmy Westlake was coming to Hawaii with a group of students, faculty, and staff from Colorado Mountain College, they were eager to have Jimmy present a talk for their group. Jimmy agreed to trade his “Majestic Northern Lights” program for a VIP tour of the telescope facilities atop Mauna Kea for the CMC SKY Club. The rest is history.
Early before dawn on March 16, fifteen SKY Clubers left DIA headed for Kialua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii: Jimmy and Linda Westlake, Bakyta Aidaralieva, Skyler Denton, Erin and Bob Furman, Kellen Johnson, Joost Kirkenier, Jordan Mann, Gene Miller, Lance Romick, Stacy Rule, Eric Snow, Kevin Wagley, and Glenn Wojcik. Professor George Bagwell joined the rest of the group the next day in Hilo. That evening, Jimmy gave his presentation on the aurora borealis to a packed house of over 100 people for the IfA at UHH.
The next evening, the SKY Club drove up the flanks of the volcano Mauna Kea to participate in a unique “Messier Marathon” at the 10,000-ft level Visitor Information Station (VIS) building. A “Messier Marathon” is an all night long hunt for the 112 deep sky objects in the Messier Catalogue, a listing of the finest star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies visible from the northern hemisphere. Using twin 14-inch Celestron telescopes provided by the IfA, the SKY Club defeated the local astronomy club by successfully finding and observing 94 of the 112 Messier objects between sundown and dawn. Jimmy unequivocally considers that night on Mauna Kea hunting down the Messier objects with his students “one of the finest nights” he has ever spent under the stars.
The SKY Club’s big day on Mauna Kea was Monday March 19. That’s when Callie McNew and Kenyon Beals of the UHH IfA provided the VIP tour of the world’s largest telescopes. Leaving Hilo (the rainiest city in the USA) early that morning, they ascended above the clouds and crested the summit of the 13,796-ft dormant volcano called Mauna Kea, the White Mountain. There, the many white and silver domes of the telescopes on top of the world loomed into view. 
The first tour was of NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, which houses a 3.0-meter telescope mirror used to study the planets and stars with infrared eyes. Our host was “Lars from Mars” Bergknut who explained the intricate workings of the telescope and its control room.
Next was a behind the scenes tour of the Gemini North Telescope provided by Erik Rau, Virtual Tour Technician. Gemini North is a gargantuan 8.1-meter telescope equipped with adaptive optics that can essentially cancel out the effects of the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. Photographs of the universe taken with this instrument and its twin, the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, rival those taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The inside of the Gemini Telescope dome is refrigerated to near freezing in order to reduce thermal expansion and contraction of the telescope when the dome is opened in the cold night air.
The final stop on the tour was the Keck I telescope, the first of the twin Keck 10-meter telescopes to come on line in 1993. The 10-meter mirrors of the Keck telescopes make them the largest telescopes operating in the world today. For the metrically challenged, the 10-meter mirror is 38 feet in diameter. It is composed of 36 1-meter hexagonal mirror segments pieced together like a giant puzzle to form a single 10-meter mirror. It was here that the so-called “10th planet” Eris was discovered in 2005, as well as many other important cosmic discoveries. 
When the tours were completed, the SKY Club joined astronomers from around the world for a delightful dinner at the Onizuka center for International Astronomy. After watching the multi-colored sunset from atop Mauna Kea, the SKY Club descended the mountain and began the rest of their week in Hawaii. This included lots of snorkeling, swimming, and sightseeing. 
One of the stated goals of the trip to Hawaii was view the hot lava flowing down the flanks of the Kilauea volcano. On their final night in Hawaii, a group of several SKY Clubbers walked out three miles to the lava flows, glowing brightly in the night, and did what very few people have ever done – roasted marshmallows over hot lava!
The SKY Club’s Spring Break trip to Hawaii was a smashing success. All who participated in the week-long trip to paradise came back with a new perspective on astronomy and will never forget their journey to the top of the world.
The SKY Club would like to offer a very special “mahalo” to each of the following: Larry Gray, Uncle Billy’s Hilo Hotel, Callie McNew, Kenyon Beals and the UHH Institute for Astronomy, and all of those at CMC who have supported the SKY Club and helped make this fantastic field trip possible.