Board OKs teaching telescope

The University of Hawaii’s Maunakea Management Board has approved plans for the installation of a new educational telescope at Halepohaku.

At its Tuesday meeting, the board discussed a conservation district use application and an environmental assessment for a New Educational Telescope Facility at the midlevel facility on Maunakea by 2024.

The project would place a 28-inch-wide telescope and an 18-foot-wide dome on an approximately 1,000-square-foot platform on the site, replacing UH’s Hoku Ke‘a teaching telescope, which is in the process of being decommissioned and hasn’t been usable since 2010. Hoku Ke‘a is located on the Maunakea summit.

At the meeting, Greg Chun, executive director of UH’s Center for Maunakea Stewardship, said the Hoku Ke‘a decommissioning process began in 2015 and created so much backlash from people criticizing the decision to remove the university’s only educational telescope without any plan to replace it that the board at the time chose to defer the process until a plan for a replacement facility was made.

Rene Pierre Martin, director of the UH-Hilo Educational Observatory, said the new facility will be used by high school students and members of the community, in addition to university students.

“We want this observatory to be used by as many people of all ages as possible,” Martin said. “It’s not a huge telescope, but it’s an excellent telescope that can do many, many interesting things.”

The board voted unanimously Tuesday to approve the application and assessment, forwarding the matter to the UH Board of Regents.