Antarctica is a desert, sitting at an elevation of 2500 m (8200 ft), the highest average surface elevation of all the continents. During winter, 24 hours of darkness means there are no temperature fluctuations, it is always cold, and it’s also extremely remote. In short, Antarctica is the perfect place to put a telescope on Earth, but it is also the most challenging.
The first cosmic ray observatory was built at Mawson station in 1955 and the International Geophysical Year drove science as a primary goal of the South Pole Station. The following 50 years, however, saw a slow roll out of new observatories, particularly when compared with competing sites like Maunakea and the Atacama Desert. With an eye to the challenges of working in difficult settings and extreme environments, I provide an introduction to Antarctic astronomy from its earliest days to the present. I will more closely examine the unique challenges of observing from this site today, including construction of new telescopes, the maintenance of equipment, staffing needs and limitations, transportation, and other environmental factors. Through this paper, I aim to examine how astronomy at extreme sites shapes the built, social, and natural environment.

The management and approval of the naming of surface features, rings, and satellites across the Solar System is the domain of the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN). Names generally fall into two categories: commemorative names honoring historical people and cultural/geographic names. Cultural/geographic names make up the majority (83%) of the 15,941 IAU-approved names, demonstrating sufficient opportunities exist to adopt more inclusive naming strategies. However, increasing awareness across the planetary science community is necessary to develop a nomenclature database representing global diversity.
Identifying appropriate surface feature names for WGPSN consideration poses many challenges for scientists, especially those whose goals include DEAI ideals and aim to avoid insensitive or inappropriate appropriation. A fundamental challenge then lies in identifying cultural experts who can provide feedback on candidate lists of names without asking for unpaid labor from tokenized communities. I will discuss my experiences navigating the naming of planetary surface features and how I leveraged cultural experts within the Smithsonian. I will address lessons learned, the following steps, and the need to move away from commemorative names in favor of the ethical use of cultural and geographic names.

For as long as our species has been constructing airplanes, it has been trying to fly them closer to celestial phenomenon for a clearer view. This was true in the 1920s when pilots mounted camera equipment onto propeller planes to photograph eclipses, and remained the case throughout the 1960s when jet aircraft were conscripted to hoist telescopes high into the air for more sophisticated observation. This presentation focuses on NASA’s development of the Kuiper Astronomical Observatory (KAO) and its predecessor, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), both mounted on refurbished jet aircraft. Over each of their life cycles, both observatories used their mobility to conduct months-long deployments in the global south during summer in the northern hemisphere. Both SOFIA and KAO were stationed in Christchurch at various intervals, where they cultivated longstanding relationships with local government and Māori communities.
Though crewed observation flights functioned as important conduits for NASA’s international relationship building, the strides made in science diplomacy were fundamentally illegible to typical metrics of scientific productivity. This paper explores the challenges of comparing airborne astronomical observatories with ground or satellite-based ones, and the idiosyncrasies of itinerant astronomy.

The recent demonstrations against the Thirty Meter Telescope project and for the protection of Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain of the island of Hawai‘i, are an invitation to look into the history of how astronomy took a foothold on, and claimed exclusive use rights to this dormant volcano. This history starts in the 1960s, when astronomer Gerard Kuiper’s quest for the best observatory site coincided with the push to develop profitable activities in what was now the 50th state of the United States (1959). The summit of Mauna Kea was then turned by astronomer John Jefferies into a “science reserve” (1968) which made public lands freely available for observatory projects. The history of the construction of a dozen major telescopes in the 1970s to 1990s shows how astronomers benefited from colonial legacies inherited from the annexation of Hawai‘i by the United States (1898), as well as the plantation economy. It also reveals the hubris of scientists who, although they regularly promised to cap the number and size of instruments in the face of intense opposition, nevertheless always attempted to add new and larger telescopes, up until the TMT project was announced for Mauna Kea in 2009. This paper is based on the independent study of internal archives from the University of Hawai‘i’s Institute for Astronomy, the Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope, the Keck Observatory, and the Kuiper papers at the University of Arizona, and other Hawaiian and environmental sources, complemented by the local press and interviews with many of this history’s living protagonists.