Introduction

With the growing concern for the development of the summit of Mauna Kea among the communities (cf. Mauna Kea Master plan¹), at the last Board of Directors meeting in December 1999, CFHT invited Ed Stevens, a local "Kahuna" (or priest), to explain to staff members the significance of Mauna Kea to the Hawaiians, and what it was about the first drafts of the Mauna Kea Science reserve Master Plan that was objected to. During his explanation, he asked the question as to why astronomers always need more and more telescopes? Why could they not use the ones that are already there in new ways, for example by combining the light of all the telescopes, as in one big OHANA. The Hawaiian word OHANA means family.

This idea, exposed by a Hawaiian minister, and for quite different reasons, had already been proposed by the late Jean Marie Mariotti² in a paper entitled "Interferometric connection of large ground based telescopes". What is uncanny is that this paper describes the connection of Mauna Kea telescopes, and further, Jean Marie had found an acronym for this project, the Optical Hawaiian Array for Nanoradian³ Astronomy... OHANA!

 

Figure 1: Left: This photo of Mauna Kea's summit seen from the south shows the 800 meter baseline between Subaru and CFHT or Gemini. Right: On this drawing are shown all the possible baselines between telescopes that have (operationnal or planned) adaptive optics systems.