Coming soon to a Regents meeting?

Readers of this blog know that there have been complaints at Regents meetings about UC plans to close the Lick Observatory near San Jose.*  UC apparently has other places it wants to put its telescope money - including a new instrument on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. 

Now there are protests about the Hawaii instrument based on alleged holy aspects of the site to native Hawaiians.  To yours truly, this is a bit odd since Mauna Kea is already littered with telescopes.  (See photo and http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/mko/about_maunakea.shtml.)  But what do I know?  Anyway, one suspects that more will be heard about this matter in forthcoming Regents meetings during the public comments sessions.

Read about it below:
While their counterparts in Hawaii assembled at Puʻuhuluhulu on Mauna Kea, or as close as they could get to today’s groundbreaking of the new and controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT),  a dozen protesters — some from as far away as Redding and Santa Cruz, as well as Antioch, Santa Clara and San Jose — demonstrated peacefully in front of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation office on Page Mill Road for several hours. The nonprofit, created from the fortune of Intel founder Moore, is said to be the largest financial backer of the $1.4 billion, multinational project, which is also due to receive some $175 million in construction costs and $4.8 million in annual operation funding from the University of California. When completed, the new 8-acre TMT observatory will house the world’s largest telescope...

Full story at http://blog.sfgate.com/hawaii/2014/10/07/peaceful-protest-in-palo-alto-against-massive-mauna-kea-telescope/#27343101=0

*Most recently: http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2014/05/lick-no-more.html