NOIRLab Celebrates AstroDay with Hawai‘i Community

May 10, 2024

NSF NOIRLab staff participate in the annual AstroDay event in Hilo, Hawai‘i

Together with the other Maunakea Observatories, the International Gemini Observatory, which is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, celebrated AstroDay Hawai’i with families and friends of all ages on Saturday 4 May 2024. The free event is led by the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo and held in the Prince Kūhio Plaza Shopping Mall in Hilo.

Volunteers from all over Hawaiʻi Island and various STEM-related organizations provided an estimated 1500 visitors with the opportunity to engage in hands-on activities and science demonstrations and to learn about the Universe and the spectacular discoveries made by Gemini and the other telescopes on Maunakea.

This year’s program, falling on the iconic ‘May the Fourth Be With You’ day of celebration, played into the Star Wars theme. Community members and even Gemini staff came by the event in full costume!

Another important feature of the annual AstroDay celebration is the Maunakea Coin Contest Award Ceremony. The Maunakea Coin Contest tasks students of all ages on Hawaiʻi Island to create a coin design that captures the cultural, environmental, and scientific significance of Maunakea. Descriptions of this year’s winner and previous years’ can be found here.

More information 

NSF NOIRLab (U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the U.S. center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the International Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory (operated in cooperation with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.

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