high above the clouds and wondered if that peak might not be a better site,” wrote Steiger, who died in 2011. He was not the only one thinking about Maunakea, which sits at 13,796 feet above sea level. Following the 1960 tsunami that devastated Hilo, the Hawaii Island Chamber of Commerce began looking at astronomy as a way to boost the local economy. Mitsuo Akiyama, then the organization’s executive director, invited Kuiper to come give Maunakea a look. “We wrote to about 1,000 mainland universities and said, ‘We have an empty mountain on Maunakea. Why don’t you folks take a look at it and do something about it,’” Akiyama told the Tribune-Herald a year before his death in 2004. Kuiper was the only one to reply. Gov. John Burns was on board with the idea and released $42,000 to build a jeep trail to the top. The road was complete in 1964, and a small dome with a 12.5- inch telescope was placed on Pu‘u Poliahu to test the site. Today, the only evidence that remains is a flat area up top and a small piece of concrete, possibly part of the foundation, poking through the cinder. The pu‘u, which would be restored under conditions of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope, offers views of Lake Waiau and most of the existing observatories. “It was more of a sightseeing visit,” recalled John Jefferies, who at the time was leading the solar program at UH’s physics department. He would become the first director of UH-Manoa’s Institute for Astronomy in 1967. “I wanted to know what it looked like and how it 4 Sunday, December 24, 2017 INSTITUTE From page 3 See INSTITUTE Page 8 Courtesy of UH-Manoa The 1979 dedication of the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. John Jefferies Former director, UH Institute for Astronomy Hawaii Tribune-Herald Walter Steiger Former UH physics professor
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