About Town | 12-11-15

Kupuna Singles meet for lunch

Kupuna Singles will meet for lunch at noon Wednesday at Original Thai. For information and reservations, call 333-8049.

Imiloa program looks at Milky Way

The Milky Way Galaxy is perhaps the most remarkable structure visible to our eyes in the night sky. But because our solar system lies inside the galaxy, we are only able to view the Milky Way from our vantage point on the inside. What would the Milky Way look like if we could see it from the outside? Andre-Nicolas Chene of Gemini Observatory will explore “Mapping the Milky Way Without Leaving Earth” at Imiloa Astronomy Center’s next Maunakea Skies program at 7 p.m. Dec. 18.

In this Maunakea Skies presentation, Dr. Chene will provide an up-to-date description of the Milky Way and introduce some of the powerful techniques astronomers have developed to measure distances, characterize astronomical objects, and map structures in our galaxy. Using the data visualization tools in Imiloa’s digital dome, he will take the audience through our galaxy’s spiral arms, to encounter stars, star clusters and dust clouds, and use the light of the twinkling stars to tell us what (and where) they are.

Chene is assistant scientist at the Gemini Observatory. He studied stellar physics and the atmospheres of massive stars at the Universite de Montreal and worked as a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada in Victoria.

Cost is $8 for individual, dual, kupuna and family members; $6 for patron members; free for silver, gold, and corporate members. Nonmember rate is $10. Pre-purchase tickets at the Imiloa front desk or by phone at 969-9703.

The center is located at 600 Imiloa Place in Hilo. Info: www.imiloahawaii.org, 969-9703.

Schools to share $350K from Chevron program

Chevron U.S.A. Inc.’s 2015 Fuel Your School program generated $350,000 to help fund 391 classroom projects, including 148 focused on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), to help connect real world experiences to classroom learning for 35,539 students at 144 Hawaii public schools.

Through the Fuel Your School program, Chevron contributed $1 when consumers purchased eight or more gallons of fuel at participating Chevron stations in Hawaii during the month of October, generating $350,000 to help fund eligible classroom projects at local public schools.

The Fuel Your School program is part of Chevron’s commitment to education. Chevron has invested nearly $250 million since 2013, supporting programs that focus on STEM education initiatives designed to arm students and teachers with the critical skills and resources needed to succeed in jobs of the future.

Keck receives NASA award

The W. M. Keck Observatory has been awarded the 2015 NASA Group Achievement Award for pioneering the Keck Observatory Archive 10 years ago, which has significantly increased the impact of Keck Observatory data.

“For the past 10 years, the NASA KOA team has boosted the science value of data acquired at Keck Observatory by providing the scientific community with open access to WMKO data,” said Mario Perez, Keck Observatory program executive, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “They helped set a standard that all new ground based observatories are adopting. For this, the NASA KOA team has earned the NASA Group Achievement Award.”

In 2004, NASA established a partnership with the Keck Observatory to acquire large volumes of data from a single instrument, the High Resolution Spectrograph, for NASA science purposes. It is standard practice to make data from NASA’s space telescopes available to the world in a public archive, but in 2004 it was unheard of to do the same with data from a ground-based telescope.