Mauna Kea, Sacred Circle
Mauna Kea, Sacred Circle, is inspired by the most prominent geographic feature of the island of Hawai’i, the mountain volcano Mauna Kea and by the stick maps that Polynesian and Micronesian sailers once made and used to chart their open water travel. In Hawaiian traditions of creation, the Earth Mother, Papahānaumoku, and the Sky Father, Wākea, created the Islands, with Hawai‘i Island being the first and the mountain, the piko (navel or center of a beginning or ending), of their creation. On the mountains sides are many shrines to the pantheon of Hawaiian gods and (it has been suggested) to astronomical phenomena. The top of Mauna Kea was historically considered kapu and only accessible to priests and the highest chiefs but, beginning in the late 1960s, a number of large telescope observatories have been built at the 13,796 ft. summit where the air is cold, dry and visibility of the heavens is near perfect. In 2019 the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, was stoped ...