| >I'll defer to others on whether Mauna Kea is superior to the EELT site since Chile hosts a lot of extremely successful observatories. Mauna Kea is special as a site because it sits in the middle of the Pacific. Their air travels for miles unobstructed before reaching the island, so it flows more smoothly over the mountain. It is also above 40% of the Earth's atmosphere and very dry [1]. This makes for much less distorted viewing than any other telescope site in the world. It is also in the Northern Hemisphere, which has a different sky than the Southern Hemisphere in Chile. The two sites complement each other in this way. > but can't come to grips with the Native Hawaiian's protests That isn't surprising. The protest movement, particularly their leaders, are great at manipulating the media. I rarely see balanced articles, or articles telling the real story behind the protests. The claims of the protesters are ostensibly about the environment and religious sacredness. But most of their claims have been debunked during extensive administrative and legal hearings [2]. What it's really about, particularly for the protest leaders, is Hawaiian sovereignty. They want to restore the monarchy. They are like Hawaii's version of the Sovereign Citizens. But unlike them, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement has its hooks in major institutions, like the University of Hawaii Manoa, the state's flagship campus, where the dean of the Hawaiian Studies school is a pro-sovereignty activist. They are also very good at social media, so many media organizations pick up their media and take it as gospel, without actually investigating their real motivations. This even is true of orgs the Sierra Club, unfortunately. They are targeting the telescopes because they cannot target the military, a more logical choice with respect to their actual goals, or the tourism industry, because a lot of them make money there. So the telescopes get the knock even though they are the most environmentally and community friendly of the three. They are good at getting attention by bullying astronomy and have even duped people like Jason Mamoa, The Rock, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elizabeth Warren into supporting them. They have all the "woke" college students backing them, even that TMT member institutions (including astronomy students). The delays in construction that are largely caused by them has caused the project cost to balloon and it's now seeking NSF funding. 1. https://about.ifa.hawaii.edu/facility/mauna-kea-observatorie... 2. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/occl/files/2019/08/3568-TMT-Final-De... |