Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

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All the undulations from the landscape.
There’s always something, and here there isn’t. The mountains, both Haleakalä and
Mauna Kea are high enough to be above the inversion layer, so the clouds are below
and all the convective motions that you have in the inversion layer aren’t there any more.
We are above that. And then on top of that you have this very, very stable atmosphere,
because of the laminar jet stream, and it doesn’t encounter any kind of obstacles. Just
until the wind comes to the mountain, and that leads to a situation where all the images
that you take from Mauna Kea are sharper than compared to any other place. They are
also better than the images taken in Chile at this new observatories site, which I’ve
helped to develop myself. I had a long conversation again with the present Director of
this place about the image quality and we compared the data etc. and it turns out that
Mauna Kea with regard to that is superior. Northern Chile, the Atacama Desert is better
in terms of when you count the number of nights. Practically, they never lose nights
because of clouds or anything like that. We have storms and winds, just like the last
week or so. They lose practically something like nine percent in Chile because of
weather, and here we lose something like thirty percent. But in the end what really counts
is the quality of the seeing. That is what has made Astronomy on Mauna Kea so famous,
and then of course the development of the most powerful telescopes in the world came to
Mauna Kea. As an Astronomer you want to do the best science that you can think of in
your creative thinking. To have a chance to work there in Hawai‘i, and to be able to
develop a new science direction at an institute like the Institute for Astronomy here, which
has a world reputation, is an enormous chance and challenge. So had I been a
completely naïve person, not really being involved in politics or so somebody would just
say, “That’s a job, I’ll take it,” and I’d come here. I wasn’t like this, I was a very political
person, I mentioned to you that I was a County Counselor for the Green Party in
Germany for ten years. I was very engaged in a lot of very important cases for the Green
Party in Germany.
Which are environmental
Most of them are environmental but they also have to do with civil rights, for instance, of
foreign people coming to our country to work there and not being allowed to do what we
believe their rights would have been. Germany in the ‘90s was in a very difficult phase
about this. so the Green Party took these things on. It was one of the reasons for the
success of the Greens. They were very outspoken about this, and of course about
environmental issues. I was of course aware of controversy about Mauna Kea, and one
of the things that I did was to start reading books about Hawaii’s History. Well, I don’t
know how many people applied for the position here, I think, more than one hundred.
Finally, what it came down to, was four were invited for interviews, and you have to give
a presentation, and then they check you out by all means. I was here for one week, I had
interviews a full day every where on both islands. When I came here, even before then, I
was provided with the Master Plan, that was my starting document as far as Mauna Kea
was concerned. Of course I read a lot about the history of Hawai‘i, books, very critical
books about the history of Hawai‘i. That was more out of curiosity because you want to
learn about which culture you fit into. It’s nothing that I grew up in. So before you make
such a move, you really want to know what is it and how do people live here, and what
are the important points. As far as Mauna Kea is concerned, my major source was the
Master Plan document, which is voluminous, two volumes, and the second part has a
compilation of practically everything which came up in the hearings, etc. So I was reading
through it. There were lots of things that were hard to understand, but I could get a grasp
of what the problem is. I sort of had this kind of naïve optimism that if one comes here as
an Institute Director and tries to change things on the University and the Institute side, in
the way that of course this Institute would always act in honesty and openness and would
explain what one wants to do as a Scientist, etc. If one tries to explain that to everybody
and tries to be in a dialogue with the Community, that at some stage things probably
could work out.
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:662