Hello everybody! I’m Summer, and I’d like to introduce the Panoptes team I’m a part of: The Hilo Panoptes team. We’re located on the Big Island of Hawaii, and we’re made up of 5 members. Specifically, we’re affiliated with the Civil Air Patrol squadron here in Hilo, and we do all of our building in the CAP hangar. We began working on our unit just before 2020, but with Covid restrictions our progress was mostly halted until around October of 2022. But since then we’ve been actively working on our unit.
Currently we’re almost done with the hardware build of our camera box and control box, and we have yet to drill the holes in our boxes. The only thing keeping us from moving forward is raising funds for our Mount and Pier (which we’ve created a GoFundMe for), and securing a location for our unit once we finish it.
We hope to put our first unit at the Mauna Kea Visitors Center, located at about 2,804m in elevation on a dormant volcano. The summit of Mauna Kea is one of the world’s best locations for Astronomy, and houses many of the world’s most important telescopes. Currently our team is made up of young adults and a few other older people, but once we finish unit
#1 we plan to make two more units, wherein the current team will graduate to mentor positions and the younger cadets of Civil Air Patrol will take over most of the building.
We’re very excited to move forward with this project alongside the other Panoptes teams all over the world, and thankful to be part of this global community brought together in the spirit of discovery! We would also love to learn more about some of the other teams through this forum if possible 🙂
