Winter's approach

It looks as though we're about to experience the first storm of the season. The state will be under a flash flood watch from tomorrow evening and the Big Island summits will likely be issued a winter storm watch from Wednesday morning. Given current conditions these might occur a little earlier, especially for the summit if the MKWC forecast is correct.

The snowfall will likely not be too significant, it's early in the season and temperatures tend to be a little too warm for ice and snow to last long at the summit (although it has happened in the past) but Mauna Kea should see its first dusting of snow in the next few days.

I'll be at the summit early next week so may miss the fun, but if there's snow still up there I'll be sure to take a couple of pictures!

Puna's ocean and sky

Having a few hours to spare this weekend I thought I'd take the chance to experiment a little with my camera. After the trip to Monterey I really liked the idea of slowing down the movement of water using long exposures, it worked quite well in Monterey in the pre-dawn sky and wanted to try something similar nearer to home. Not always being an early riser I used an ND filter to reduce the light in the pictures above and below and waited for the sun to set in the last two.

I'm sure the pictures could be improved and I'm still not that great when it comes to composition, that's something I'm working on. Anyway, the above picture was taken from my favourite place on the island, the wonderful drive along the coast between Isaac Hale Beach Park (in Pohoiki Bay) and Kalapana. It's such a beautiful road and now the whales are coming back for the winter I'm sure I'll be down there a lot more in the next few months!

Same place, but zoomed in a little with an ND filter - I was trying to smooth out the waves on the rocks.

Much nearer home this evening - the coastline of Hawaiian Paradise Park at the end of Paradise Drive. This is another of my favourite whale watching spots although so far I don't think the whales have reached this side of the island yet. It won't be long though.

Same place but taken on Saturday evening. I don't think it's as nice a shot as the one above, but I really liked the way the red clouds changed the colour of the water. Both these last two used pretty long exposures in an attempt to make the water look interesting - both are blends of 2, 4 and 8 second exposures. Click on the pictures if you want to see larger versions.

Maybe this year I'll actually be able to photograph some whales - I tried last year but never had much luck.

This broadband thing is bad!

What album should I listen to next? I keep coming back to Dylan even though I'm not a fan but also revisited my past - The Cult, The Cure, The Smiths and then thought I need to pick a band that didn't start with "The".

The problem is I'm still up late at night because I rediscovered "The The". Uncertain Smile - what a song that was with Jules Holland on the piano. Now all I need to do is find the extended version which I used to dance to in the old disco days.

Don't laugh over there, I can hear you!

I'm stuck, what to do?

This may turn out to be a bad idea, or not, but today I went to the Verizon shop in Hilo and bought myself mobile broadband for $60 a month. It was a real suck up moment - do I really want to spend that amount of money each month for fast internet access when I've managed to get by on a dial up for well over a decade?

First results indicate I've been a bloody idiot not to go down the broadband route before. I'm listening to Bob Dylan's(1) latest albums while uploading photos and reading email with attached pictures all at the same time while also making a nice cup of tea and reading photo book reviews. I could have checked my bank balance as well but I didn't want to spoil the day.

This rocks! But it's expensive. The really bad thing about this is I can't use ridiculously slow dial up speeds to make excuses anymore. Coupled with that, I've run out of photographs. I think I may have a few more really nice ones lying around but all I can find right now are a couple of photos of birds. Both were taken in the UK in September and one's a Nottingham heron (above) and the other is a goose, I think, taken in Bracknell where I grew up.

Sorry, I'll try to get back to the Mauna Kea sunsets and sunrises as soon as I can - after I've listened to a couple more online albums...

(1) I've never been a Dylan fan but "Dreamin' of you" and "If you ever go to Houston" seem to have hit the right nerve with me!

A photo book?

Protege over at "Life Through Reflections" very kindly suggested I publish a book with the pictures in my blog. In fact I did try this exact thing a few months ago, a simple photo book using Blurb but the result wasn't what I'd hoped for. I don't think it was anything to do with Blurb, but the quality of the photos in the book were quite poor which I'm sure was down to the pictures I used.

Since then I think my photography skills have improved a little bit so I'm willing to give things another try. One of the problems, though, is that I'm on a dialup at home so using a web-based photo book publisher is a little tricky. In fact it's hair-pullingly frustrating. If possible, I'd prefer to download the software in a one-off painful experience, edit the book the way I want and then upload the result, again painfully, once I'm done.

It seems most of the top-rated photo book publishers only offer online publishing software which is horrendous to use over a dialup. If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations I'm listening!

What's the picture above? It's a view from just outside the CFHT at sunset. Cinder cones to the left, a hint of the earth's shadow above the cones (and also to the extreme right), cloud tops at around the typical inversion layer and the shadow of Mauna Kea's summit to the right. I hope you like it and the picture gets bigger if you click on it!

Another day at the office

The MKWC weather forecast wasn't good, the evening should be fine but come the second half of the night the inversion layer was expected to break down and we stood a good chance of fog at the summit. This meant we had to get going early because I had a few engineering tasks I really wanted to get done which required decent conditions and a dome that was in equilibrium with the outside air temperature. Having a warm dome compared to the atmosphere means you get local turbulence which has quite an impact on image quality, and that would hurt our planned tests.

Still, there was time to wander outside and take the odd snapshot but it was hurried. The shadow of Mauna Kea was visible as usual (above) although at this time of year its relative position has moved so far from the actual summit that the pictures aren't so interesting from this location. The Earth's shadow was also just visible but still low on the horizon. By the time I'd taken that quick panorama I had to go back inside to get some of the calibrations started, but just before walking through the door I heard a commotion from some distance behind me.

Turning around I saw a sight I don't see often - the smaller than usual group of sightseers were making an awful lot of fuss and switching from one side of the summit road where they had watched the sun set into the Pacific and were now all quite excited and pointing over to the east. Flashlights were going off continually and one or two observatory vehicles, heading up to work for the night, were stuck behind the excited crowd.

I'm not absolutely certain what they saw, I couldn't see from my location, but I think someone probably saw the moon rise just above the clouds in the east and had said so. The message must have been passed along quickly because it was utter chaos for a couple of minutes! Unfortunately, I had to get back inside for a few minutes so couldn't go down to see what all the excitement was about, but I'm sure it was the moonrise.

About ten minutes later I was able to pop outside again, this time with tripod in hand. The weather system the MKWC had mentioned was clearly visible off to the west-north-west, seen as the reddish clouds in the distance behind the Subaru Observatory. These were supposed to move in overnight or at least the associated weather system was going to destabilize our atmosphere. It never happened and we left the summit at 6am very tired, cold and hungry but pleased after a really good night's work!

As ever, please click on the pictures if you want to see larger versions.

All quiet on the western front

It's the beginning of another long night of observing on Mauna Kea, but it seems very quiet. Looking around, there seem to be far fewer tourists than usual and even my spot just outside the UKIRT is completely deserted. There are certainly a few tour groups on the summit this evening but the road is usually quite busy with people walking between viewing spots and it was empty when I took the picture below. Incidentally, if you look closely you can just see the shadow of Mauna Kea on the right hand side of the photo.

Perhaps it's because it's Monday...

Why I wait until after sunset

This is your typical tourist shot, the sunset looks great to your eye but try and capture the shot with a camera and you have one nasty bright sun in the photo. Even this took a bit of an effort to get a little detail on the observatories despite that setting sun!

The colours in the sky for 20 to 30 minutes after sunset are simply awesome even if I hate that word! It's worth hanging around for that long just to get a good photo from Mauna Kea's summit. It's worth the wait even if you freeze your bollocks off (apologies to the ladies).

And put that flash away. I can't believe the number of people who take pictures of a Mauna Kea sunset and have the flash turned on. What on earth are you hoping to accomplish?

Sorry, bad day, I just needed to vent. I hope you're having a great weekend and had a wonderful and spooky Halloween!

Probing the cosmological dark ages

The research papers are officially published and the record breaking observation we made a few months ago is now out there for everyone to read about. It's a strange feeling because I don't think I made much of a scientific contribution to this, Nial Tanvir and Ruben Salvaterra's teams were certainly the people that should take all the credit, but as luck would have it Thor Wold and myself were the first to image and detect the most distant object ever seen in the universe from the ground! Our 20-minute observation, done despite gale-force summit winds, showed that the gamma-ray burst was very red meaning it was either a dusty galaxy, or, more excitingly, an extremely distant object. It turns out it was the latter and the most distant object anyone has seen so far in human history. It's so far away that it happened when the universe was extremely young and few stars and galaxies had had a chance to form, hence the phrase "the dark ages".

Peter Coles wrote a very interesting article about the significance of the discovery in "The Edge of Darkness". The BBC had the news on their front page just the other day under an almost tabloid yet accurate headline - "Stellar blast is record-breaker". The journal Nature is where the real science was published and although you need paid access to the journal there is some stuff you can read in "Most distant gamma-ray burst spotted" and "A flash from the early Universe".

Thor's experience of the night is in the latest UKIRT newsletter in "View from the Top".

I'm sure the record won't last too long but sometimes you can be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. In this case the two most experienced staff observers were at the summit together and decided to "give it a go" despite the bad weather, and what a result!

High altitude vog

The rule of thumb on Mauna Kea is that vog, the stuff given off by the active volcano Kilauea, tends not to get above approximately 10,000 feet. When you see haze in the atmosphere above this level it's usually attributed to "Gobi Desert dust"; dirt from the Gobi Desert in Asia blown into the atmosphere by local storms and then brought to Hawai`i across the Pacific by high level winds.

I can't recall ever reading the research paper but apparently there was a study carried out some years ago using the observatories on Mauna Loa (probably the NOAA atmospheric monitoring facility) that found the haze was in fact not due to dust but pollutants from China's industrial regions. If anyone is aware of the study I refer to, I'd be more than grateful for a link to the paper!

With the rather active state of Kilauea recently, it seems on days when the trade winds are not blowing and convection becomes dominant on the Big Island, vog does get to the summit levels and even higher. My guess is that there is so much vog compared to recent years that an observable amount now breaks through the usual inversion layer and escapes to higher altitudes whereas previously some vog might get to higher levels although it wouldn't be enough to be noticed by the casual observer.

Although I can't be certain the picture above shows vog, about 10 minutes after sunset the sky took on a very unusual colour with a pinkish tone high above us. The GOES infrared satellite images indicated there was no cirrus nearby yet there was clearly something at mid-to-high altitude and the vog at slightly lower elevations, such as 9,000 feet at Hale Pohaku, was amongst the worst I had experienced. Whatever it was, it made for another gorgeous if somewhat unusual sunset!

A larger version of the picture is available by clicking on the image above. Incidentally, Subaru is to the left with the twin Kecks on the right. Haleakala, on the island of Maui, is visible to the far right.