Visiting the Telescopes on Mauna Kea is well worth doing while on Hawaii's Big Island. Because of the road conditions and the altitude of 13,800 ft, its a bit more involved than a day at the beach. In this video, I show you our drive up to the top of Mauna Kea, what we saw (including the inside of one of the Keck telescopes), and cover all the vehicle requirements and clothing recommendations. Also in the video is a brief discussion how telescopes like these use adaptive optics to un-twinkle the atmosphere and produce images as good as or even better than space telescopes like the Hubble at a fraction of the cost.

Links:

W. M. Keck Observatory https://www.keckobservatory.org/
Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope https://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/about/
European Southern Observatory https://www.eso.org

My brother Nick’s Whistler Blackcomb skiing book page https://www.whistlerguidebook.com/

And thanks to Nick for letting me use some of his photos and video from Mauna Kea!