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5 books match the query 'Astronomical observatories'
Big and Bright
A History of the McDonald ObservatoryBy David S. Evans and J. Derral Mulholland
University of Texas Press, 1986
By day, every year over 40,000 visitors pour in. Across the Rio Grande, a hundred miles away, Mexican mountaineers use the white domes as landmarks. By night, perched almost 7,000 feet above the sleeping, earthbound world, astronomers probe the secrets of the night sky. This is the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, one of the world's largest university-operated astronomical installations.
Big and Bright: A History of the McDonald Observatory is the story of a remarkable collaboration between two major universities, one a prestigious private school, the other a growing southwestern state institution. The University of Chicago had astronomers, but its Yerkes Observatory was aging and underfunded; the University of Texas had money for an observatory but no working astronomer to staff it. Out of their mutual need, they formed a thirty-year compact for a joint venture. Unusual in its day, the Yerkes-McDonald connection presaged the future. In this arrangement, one can see some of the beginnings of today's consortium "big science."
Now the McDonald Observatory's early history can be put in proper perspective. Blessed with a gifted and driving founding director, the world's (then) second-largest telescope, and an isolation that permitted it to be virtually the only major astronomical observatory that continued operations throughout World War II, the staff of McDonald Observatory helped lay the foundations of modern astrophysics during the 1940s. For over a decade after the war, a lonely mountaintop in West Texas was the mecca that drew nearly all the most important astronomers from all over the world.
Based on personal reminiscences and archival material, as well as published historical sources, Big and Bright is one of the few histories of a major observatory, unique in its focus on the human side of the story.
First Light
Kanaka 'Oiwi Resistance to Settler Science at Mauna a WakeaIokepa Casumbal-Salazar
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Understanding the Hawai‘i Island summit of Mauna a Wākea as a place of ancestral connection, cultural resurgence, and political resistance for Native Hawaiians
First Light is a site-specific study of Native Hawaiian resistance to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna a Wākea, the sacred mountain on the island of Hawai‘i. Drawing on personal interviews, oral histories, archival research, participant observation, and popular, legal, scientific, and Indigenous discourses, Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar explores both the campaign to build the observatory and the movement against it. He asks how astronomers have become stewards of Mauna a Wākea while Kānaka ‘Ōiwi (Aboriginal Hawaiians), in protest, are recast as obstructing progress and clinging to ancient superstitions.
Contextualizing contemporary resistance to telescope expansion within the past 132 years of struggle against U.S. empire in Hawai‘i, Casumbal-Salazar argues the Kanaka-led efforts to protect their ancestral lands did not begin with the TMT and only become legible when understood in the broader history of resistance to U.S. settler hegemony as told through the voices and actions of kiaʻi ʻāina (land defenders). First Light explores how settler science, capital, and law have been mobilized in ways that rationalize industrial development projects like the TMT and promote a vision of “coexistence” that enables the dehumanization of Kānaka ‘Ōiwi and their alienation from ʻāina.
Challenging the assumptions and aggressions of neoliberal environmental policy, settler multiculturalism, and U.S. military occupation, First Light reinforces calls for a moratorium on new telescope development and a literacy in Kanaka ‘Ōiwi movements for life, land, and ea (independence, sovereignty).
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Observatories of the Southwest
A Guide for Curious SkywatchersDouglas Isbell and Stephen E. Strom
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Douglas Isbell and Stephen Strom, both intimately involved in southwestern astronomy, have written a practical guide to the major observatories of the region for those eager to learn what modern telescopes are doing, to understand the role each of these often quirky places has played in advancing our understanding of the cosmos, and hopefully to visit and see the tools of the astronomer up close. For each observatory, the authors describe its history, highlights of its contributions to astronomy—with an emphasis on recent results—and information for visitors. Also included are wide-ranging interviews with astronomers closely associated with each site.
Observatories covered range from McDonald in Texas to Palomar in California, with significant outposts in between: Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory southwest of Tucson, the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and the Whipple Observatory outside Amado; and New Mexico’s Very Large Array near Socorro and Sacramento Peak close to Sunspot. In addition to describing these established institutions, they also take a look ahead to the most powerful ground-based telescope in the world just beginning to operate at full power on Mount Graham in Safford, Arizona.
With more than three dozen illustrations, Observatories of the Southwest is accessible to amateur astronomers, tourists, students, and teachers—anyone fascinated with the contributions that astronomy has made to deepening our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, whether exploring the solar system from Lowell Observatory or studying the birth of stars using the army of giant radio telescopes at the Very Large Array. This book aims to inspire visits to these sites by illuminating the major scientific questions being pursued every clear night beneath the dark skies of the Southwest and the amazing machinery that makes these pursuits possible.
The Last of the Great Observatories
Spitzer and the Era of Faster, Better, Cheaper at NASAGeorge H. Rieke
University of Arizona Press, 2006
George Rieke played a key role in Spitzer and now relates the story of how that observatory was built and launched into space. Telling the story of this single mission within the context of NASA space science over two turbulent decades, he describes how, after a tortuous political trail to approval, Spitzer was started at the peak of NASA’s experiment with streamlining and downsizing its mission development process, termed “faster better cheaper.” Up to its official start and even afterward, Spitzer was significant not merely in terms of its scientific value but because it stood at the center of major changes in space science policy and politics. Through interviews with many of the project participants, Rieke reconstructs the political and managerial process by which space missions are conceived, approved, and developed. He reveals that by the time Spitzer had been completed, a number of mission failures had undermined faith in “faster-better-cheaper” and a more conservative approach was imposed. Rieke examines in detail the premises behind “faster better cheaper,” their strengths and weaknesses, and their ultimate impact within the context of NASA’s continuing search for the best way to build future missions.
Rieke’s participant’s perspective takes readers inside Congress and NASA to trace the progress of missions prior to the excitement of the launch, revealing the enormously complex and often disheartening political process that needs to be negotiated. He also shares some of the new observations and discoveries made by Spitzer in just its first year of operation. As the only book devoted to the Spitzer mission, The Last of the Great Observatories is a story at the nexus of politics and science, shedding new light on both spheres as it contemplates the future of mankind’s exploration of the universe.
The Stars of Mauna Kea
Building Giant Telescopes on Hawai‘i’s Most Revered MountainPascal Marichalar
University of Chicago Press, 2026
The inside account of how astronomers were able to build the world’s largest observatories on Hawai‘i’s most revered mountain.
In July 2019, a demonstration erupted on Hawai‘i Island to prevent the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which, if built, would be one of the largest and most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world. For months, thousands of people camped on the access road leading to the proposed location: Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano, the highest point in Hawai‘i, and a sacred site for Native Hawaiians. The standoff in 2019 was not the first. For decades, activists had resisted attempts to build the TMT and its predecessors. Even so, many astronomers were startled by opposition to the TMT and the discoveries it promised. Astronomers were focused on the stars; Native Hawaiians and environmentalists were concerned about not only the sky, but also the land.
The Stars of Mauna Kea traces the history of astronomy on Hawai‘i Island, shedding new light on why scientists were granted access to the volcano in the first place. Beginning in 1959, when Hawai‘i became the fiftieth US state, it chronicles the ways astronomers benefited from Hawai‘i’s colonial past to gain free and exclusive land use rights on what had long been the archipelago’s most revered mountain. Drawing on unprecedented archival research and extensive interviews, Pascal Marichalar carefully charts the course of astronomical development on Mauna Kea. He describes the devastating tsunami that led a local businessman to contact scientists just as a renowned astronomer was scouting for places to observe the stars; the controversial authority the University of Hawai‘i assumed over the volcano after 1964; the environmental opposition to the first large international project, the Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope; and the resistance to telescope development that became a major focus of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Marichalar introduces readers to scientists working on Mauna Kea, as well as the people living in the mountain’s shadow, including key opposition figures involved in recent events.
Like the dark matter that holds together rotating galaxies, the colonial forces that have shaped Hawai‘i exert a gravitational pull on the science undertaken on the volcano’s summit. The Stars of Mauna Kea brings readers inside an ongoing debate over the morality of scientific research conducted on contested ground.