Maikalani Open House

Today was the open house marking the first anniversary of the new building on Maui - "Maikalani" or "ATRC". It was a ton of fun. I got to do the polarization demo - calcite, polarizing sheet, polarized sunglasses, quarter-wave sheet, a laser, lens, screen and some cool setups (quad-pol interferrometer & AO demonstrator + other stuff). There were maybe 300-400 people. Crazy. The amateur group set up lots of neat scopes outside. Bill (mostly) smashed roses, eggs and things dunked in liquid nitrogen. Joe kicked off the lab tour with a talk then Untenberger showed the coelostat, Stuart showed his south-pole solar bench, Heather had people play with the thermal-IR camera and I did the demo. There were talks, videos and other stuff to play with. All up, a cool day. Jeff busted out the 'directors reserve' tequilla to finish the night off.





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