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| Early Days Gerard P. Kuiper Early Graduate Students Missions to the Moon |
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William Hartmann, on the Mauna Kea telescope site In the summer of ’64, Kuiper was the first person to get the idea that there should be observatories on Mauna Kea, or at least that Mauna Kea might be a fantastically good site for observatories. This is funny because what they were looking for was lack of water vapor. Water vapor absorbs the infrared light coming in through the atmosphere, so you want to get up above it. You’d think the worst place would be out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But Mauna Kea is so big—14,000 feet—it sticks up above most of it. Kuiper hit on this idea of going up there and seeing if there could be an observatory there. Kuiper had a history of hiring interesting, off-beat people, like Ewen Whitaker. He had been the head of the lunar section of the British Astronomical Association, which is basically an amateur association. Another example was Alika Herring, a guy who built very high quality amateur-sized telescopes, and Kuiper hired him to come in and take his homemade telescope down to Hawaii and do site testing down there. |
In the spring of 1964, Alika had been down there for a couple of months, I guess, living up at the 10,000 foot level in little stone cabins that were sort of Ranger cabins and then driving up to the 14,000 foot level at night. Okay, time for Alika to have a vacation. Kuiper sends young Bill, me, down to Hawaii. That was the first time I had ever been to Hawaii. I just completely fell in love with the Big Island; it’s such a wonderful place to be. Kuiper said, “Now, you take some days off and go down to see the volcano part, because this is part of your training, and see craters and lava flows and all of that,” which I had not seen before, coming from Pennsylvania. So I did site testing down there, for what became Mauna Kea Observatory. Some years passed, and that turns into a big world-class observatory. By the 1980s, Dale Cruikshank, my buddy who had worked on the spectrometers for Kuiper, had gone off to the University of Hawaii and is doing infrared spectrometry, and following exactly the footsteps that Kuiper had trained him in. |
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