Monday, Jul 12, 2004
Blinded me with scienceBy ANDREW PERALA
In a basement science lab on the University of Hawaii at Hilo campus, 17 students cluster around two slide projectors at the front of a darkened classroom-turned-laboratory.

As members of the inaugural class of the Akamai Observatory Short Course, they are presenting their discoveries and conclusions from the "Inquiry on Color and Light."

The hands-on experiment is one of several topics studied, and concludes a week of 10-hour days spent studying electronics, optics and astrophysics, as well as mechanical and software engineering.

Their teachers are all career researchers, technicians and scientists from the observatories on Mauna Kea, the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, and graduate students associated with the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Adaptive Optics.

The windowless room is a scientist's dream and a claustrophobe's nightmare, perfect for this experiment: exploring the mysteries of light.

In groups of two or three, students crowd the room and move among their various experimental stations. There are slide projectors, overhead projectors and several rectangular boxes that spill rays of white light onto the table top. A buzz of discovery laced with questions fills the air; rainbows and circles and squares of projected color splash the walls.

The equipment is standard issue for a university's audio-visual supply room. Nothing like the oscilloscopes, spectrometers and multi-meters they'd used with the scientists and technicians of Mauna Kea. But even basic equipment can demonstrate "additive and subtractive" color mixing, putting students in charge of the discovery process.

The students are, in the words of Isaac Newton, "standing on the shoulders of giants who preceded them in discovery."

Funded by the Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO) and co-sponsored by the W. M. Keck Observatory, the Akamai Observatory Short Course will become an annual outreach program in both Hilo and Waimea.

W. M. Keck Observatory astronomer David Le Mignant and colleague Sarah Anderson worked with the CfAO team of Lisa Hunter, Malika Moutawakkil and Gale Kihoi to coordinate the course, provided free to the students. Astronomy graduate students Patrik Jonsson and Michael McElwain, and professor Claire Max, all from the Center for Adaptive Optics, were the principal instructors.

Other teachers included staff from the Canada-France-Hawaii, Gemini, Keck and Submillimeter Array observatories who donated their time and expertise.

The group spent two days in Waimea and two days in Hilo, with the high point -- literally -- happening Wednesday on the summit of Mauna Kea. The students toured four facilities, stayed for sunset, and enjoyed the rise of a very full moon.

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