Word: kea
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Just 30 miles inland, conditions aren't quite so pleasant. The sunset is every bit as gorgeous from here, at the summit of the long-dormant volcano Mauna Kea, but temperatures hover around 38[degrees]F, with a windchill that dips well below freezing. At an altitude of nearly 14,000 ft., the atmosphere carries barely half the oxygen it does at sea level, so the slightest exertion can leave visitors gasping. Those who travel to the summit without getting properly acclimated risk altitude sickness and even death...
...nothing remarkable. Known to astronomers as Eugenia, it measures about 133 miles across and is one of thousands of bits of cosmic flotsam in the great rubble stream between Mars and Jupiter. When an international team of astronomers working at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii turned their attention toward Eugenia one evening last fall, however, they spotted something curious. Off on the upper-left corner of the fuzzy-looking image was another smear of light they couldn't identify. "These blobs are often artifacts of the optics," says astronomer William Merline, head...
Only a few observatories have mirrors over 6.5 meters, and Magellan's inclusion of two identical mirrors enhances its field of view, resolving power and total viewing time. Presently, the largest observatory in the world is the 10-meter Keck twin telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii...
...evolution and structure are excruciatingly faint, and it takes every bit of skill observers have to tease out their secrets. It hasn't been until the past decade, in fact, that astronomers have had powerful telescopes like the Hubble out in space and the Keck atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea, ultrafast supercomputers and super-sensitive electronic light detectors to give them the data they hunger for. In a very real sense, cosmology has only lately crossed the dividing line from theology into true science...
...heady days in the rarefied world of telescope making. Not since the 1934 casting of Mount Palomar's 5-m mirror -- a record size at the time -- has there been more innovation or competition to push the edge of possibility. In the clear air above Hawaii's Mauna Kea, the Keck I Telescope's mammoth 10-m mirror, built of 36 separate segments, is nearing final assembly -- a 10-month process was completed last week. Four years from now it will be joined by the Keck II, an equally monstrous twin. By then, the European Southern Observatory hopes to have...