Videos
‘Ohana Stargazing @ Mo‘okini Heiau
August 27, 2022
‘ʻOhana Kilo Hōkū held an historic stargazing event at the legendary Moʻokini Heiau on the island of Hawaiʻi on August 27, 2022. This event was particularly impactful for our group. The Kahuna nui of Moʻokini heiau is Leimomi Lum. Kahuna Leimomi was one of the first female police officers in Hawaiʻi. She has overseen the re-dedication of Moʻokini Heiau from a temple of human sacrifice to a temple dedicated to children. We honored her legacy by bringing the children! Our event began with a traditional Hawaiian ‘oli and offerings in the temple.
Building on a favorite story of one of our Founding Directors, Kālepa Baybayan, about King Kamehameha allowing Captain George Vancouver to set up telescopes in Hikiau Heiau temple grounds, our ʻOhana Stargazing event also set up telescopes in Moʻokini Heiau temple grounds. We built upon our ancestor’s legacy by also teaching about the Hawaiian star compass, giving presentations by the two living Native Hawaiian astrophysics professors, the two living astrophysics doctoral candidates, and one of our board members who is one of the few Native Hawaiians working on satellites. These role models for our keiki shared about their work and studies and taught our guests how to navigate the stars without instrumentation!
Griffith Observatory's All Space Considered program
Shadow the Scientist - Astronomy Nights Videos
January 11 to 12, 2022
Professor Raja GuhaThakurta and team
Starting Tuesday morning January 11 at 12:30 *am* Hawaii time (think late Monday night) and running to 6 am, 'Ohana Kilo Hōkū (OKH) is pleased to invite you to a Shadow the Scientists: Astronomy Night with Dr. Brian Lemaux (Gemini-N/NOIRLab), Dr. Olga Cucciati (Observatory of Bologna, Italy), Dr. Lu Shen (University of Science and Technology China), Dr. Roy Gal (Institute for Astronomy, UH), Dr. Ben Forrest (University of California, Davis), and Dr. Puragra Guhathakurta (University of California, Santa Cruz), and graduate student Priti Staab (University of California, Davis). The team will be looking in a part of the sky called COSMOS, made famous by being the subject of one of the largest mosaic of images ever recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope. This part of the sky has also been observed with NASA’s fleet of great space observatories as well as those from the European Space Agency. However, despite over two decades of observations in this part of the sky, some discoveries have been elusive. In these observations, the team will be observing on the Keck II telescope using a technique called optical multi-object spectroscopy to target two suspected large groups of galaxies under formation when the universe was about 10-20% of its current age. With these observations, they will be measuring the distances to galaxies, estimating the numbers of stars they form, how the activity of their black holes, and how galaxies are transformed as they assemble into massive structures in the early universe.
Starting Wednesday morning January 12 at 12:30 *am* Hawaii time (think late Tuesday night) and running to 6 am, the team will be observing COSMOS again, this time using the Subaru telescope. The team will be exploring a giant grouping of galaxies using a technique called narrowband imaging. This technique employs specialized filters that allows the the team to take pictures that are sensitive to the star-forming regions of galaxies. The grouping of galaxies is known as the Hyperion proto-supercluster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_proto-supercluster), which was discovered by the team three years ago using observations from telescopes around the world. The Subaru observations will be used to continue to map out this structure of galaxies, to measure distances to galaxies within the structure, and to determine which parts of Hyperion contain galaxies that are rapidly forming stars.
November 22 to 23, 2021
Professor Raja GuhaThakurta and team
The team used a technique called "adaptive optics" to compensate in real time for the twinkling of stars caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere. The goal was to create ultra sharp images in near infrared light of families of stars (star clusters) in the Andromeda galaxy, located at a distance of 2.5 million light years.
September 12-13, 2021
Professor Raja GuhaThakurta and team
Raja’s primary goal on this night, along with his collaborators Amanda Quirk and Karrie Gilbert, was to use the Keck II 10-meter telescope on Mauna Kea and the DEIMOS spectrograph to obtain spectra of red giant branch stars that are part of the disk and halo of the Triangulum galaxy (a.k.a. Messier 33 or M33) located 2.7 million light years from Earth. Their goal was to compare the overall rotation speed of the disk of stars to that of the hydrogen gas, the latter being the raw material from which stars form in a galaxy. Their group has discovered two mysterious things in the course of this research project: (1) a population of "halo" stars on swarming orbits located in the inner region of M33, and (2) a population of "weak CN" stars with unusual surface chemistry. Raja and his team have collected Keck DEIMOS spectra of M33 stars in 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020 to go with the 2021 data they are in the process of collecting
September 2-3, 2021
Professor Raja GuhaThakurta and team
Raja's primary goal on this night was to obtain spectra of a class of stars called RR Lyrae that are located in the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. The halo of the Milky Way is thought to be the result of cannibalism of many smaller galaxies. Raja sought to obtain spectra of the most distant RR Lyrae to date, located roughly 300 to 350 thousand light years (90–115 kiloparsecs) from us. These RR Lyrae stars undergo periodic pulsations on the time scale of 12 to 18 hours. During the pulsation, their brightness and surface temperature change quite dramatically.