A Pacific View

A little rest and relaxation in Puna

2012-01-31T21:39:00.008-10:00

It's Sunday evening on the Puna coast roughly halfway between Kalapana and Kapoho and the place I go to relieve stress. Just before taking the photos I met a very interesting guy - retired and clearly well-off with a large house just above the shoreline. He used to be a photographer and cameraman and had worked for many of the major movie companies in the US and had clearly done quite well financially! It turned out he used to live and work in California and shared my love of the Monterey/Carmel area and the whole central California coastline. He was walking his dogs and clearing up the trash on the "beach" as he does every day. I hope to meet him again and maybe give him a print or two of these photos. His dogs were also super-friendly!

Rock pools and surf. The waves weren't too high but the water was very "messy" with no regular wave sets. It made timing interesting!

The sun was setting and made the colours interesting despite most of the lava rock being a light-sucking black.

One black & white shot because I thought it made things look a little more dramatic, but that wave almost got me!

A change of position because the waves were getting a little dangerous considering where I had perched myself. I kept looking out for whales since this is the height of the whale season but unfortunately saw none.

It was getting quite dark now so switched position again to take in the wonderful colours of sunset. And the blackness of the lava of course...

Puna is on the east side of the island so not great for sunset shots, but the sky and ocean can still take on magical colours at this time of day.

And that was it for the evening. A short drive back home, stress somewhat lowered and relieved to find I could still remember how to operate my camera...

As always, you can view larger versions of the pictures by clicking on them.

A well-deserved award

2012-01-15T23:57:00.002-10:00

The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) won an award from the Royal Astronomical Society. It's a bit of the way down the page but it's a well-deserved award that reflects some pretty damn hard work lots of people have put in over the last few years. It doesn't include me of course, I'm just a grunt, but I like it that way...

Almost the same

2012-01-15T22:51:00.005-10:00

There's a picture I saw in a recent edition of Outdoor Photographer, a magazine I've subscribed to for the last couple of years, that made me say "What the hell, that's my photo!". You can see the picture at the top of this article. My picture is above.

It wasn't my photo in the article but it looks as though the photographer took his photo from almost the same spot as I did last year. It's a nice photo and captures those crepuscular rays a regular reader will know I love, except I'm not blogging regularly these days so that's a bit of an oxymoron. Anyway, it got me thinking - why not just pick up the camera again and start taking some photos? Well, my camera is still in storage but I promise to bring it out soon. The photo in that article made me realise that I'm not a complete muggins when it comes to capturing the beautiful scenery here although the real reason I've not being active recently is that I've been too busy. I need to change that and get my life back into a proper perspective.

I'll also say that even if you prefer the picture in the article, at least I know how to keep my horizon straight!

Just a couple more from that trip to Maui. They've appeared on the blog before...

PS. I should add that the picture in the printed version of Outdoor Photographer looks much better than the online one and has had some extra processing done.

Steve Rawlings

2012-01-12T19:36:00.004-10:00

I'm stunned, and so are many members of the astronomy community. Rather than hearing through the grapevine I just happened to read this article on the BBC site this morning about how Steve was found dead yesterday.

Steve was a good friend and was a regular UKIRT observer. I supported many of his runs and we spent a lot of time together both at the summit of Mauna Kea and having dinner and beers in Hilo. Steve stopped coming out to Hawaii a few years ago mainly because we switched to survey operations and had fewer visiting observers, but he always complained that when he visited it always snowed and he never got any observing time!

Steve will be missed by his many good friends at the UKIRT and JCMT and I'm sure around the world. He was a wonderful person and lots of fun to be with. We once talked about arranging a cricket match in Hilo against the local softball team and he was going to bring his cricket gear out and also arrange to get the game onto the local news! Unfortunately it never happened, but my main memory of him was us having fun, especially on the soccer field! (Scroll down to the report at the end of the newsletter - in the picture Steve is second from right in the front row and there's even a rare shot of me - front row centre in the blue top kneeling down).

I know everyone at the JAC, both current and ex-employees, send their heart-felt condolences to Steve's family and friends. This is such a shock.

I wish you all a very merry Christmas

2011-12-23T22:38:00.004-10:00

It's not one of my photos, in fact I haven't picked up my camera for two or three months. It's a picture taken from the UH 88-inch webcam this evening at sunset. The weather here has been incredibly bad over the last couple of months and we've hardly been open but tonight we finally got back into action. The summit road has been closed for ages due to snow and ice and on the occasions it has been open to the public the summit has been in fog. This evening, however, the skies cleared and at least according to this view the summit was about the busiest I have ever seen!

Anyway, sorry for not posting recently, the last couple of months have been very difficult and also extremely busy. I'll try and get my act together regarding this blog in the new year. In the meantime:

I wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a wonderful new year!

Tom

Spooky goings-on at UKIRT

2011-10-25T18:59:00.005-10:00

It was almost midnight last night when the first spooky apparition was picked up by one of UKIRT's thermal infrared security cameras and triggered the motion sensor. It had been a cold, dark and quiet night up until then but suddenly the software sent out a burst of images capturing our warm friend ghosting across the field of view.

A second later it had drifted to the right, its unearthly body and eerie limbs glowing brightly in infrared light.

And before you could say "Is it Halloween yet?" it was gone.

UKIRT gets a shove

2011-10-19T20:11:00.009-10:00

Just after two o'clock this afternoon a magnitude 4.5 earthquake struck the Big Island, located about 9 kilometers north west of Mauna Kea's summit and at a depth of approximately 19 kilometers. The earthquakes haven't stopped since then although none have been as strong as the first one. Although not a big earthquake anything over magnitude 4 on Mauna Kea has the potential to do some harm to the telescopes at the summit.

Fortunately the earthquake struck while we had a crew at the summit so they were quickly able to inspect both the JCMT and UKIRT. The JCMT was unscathed but a broken shear pin on UKIRT's south column was discovered which meant the telescope had been shoved out of alignment by the event and if it wasn't fixed we'd have no idea where the telescope would be pointing tonight. The amount of movement necessary to break a shear pin is tiny, less than a millimetre perhaps, but that small movement is multiplied several times on the sky and we could literally spend hours just trying to find out what we are looking at without a quick fix.

Fortunately our engineers and technicians were able to put the telescope back where it should be although this was a crude readjustment and we'll have to do a proper alignment in the next night or two, but it's currently good enough for government work! Still, this event is very unusual. We do experience earthquakes underneath Mauna Kea from time to time, but a cluster like this is very rare, I don't remember one like this occurring since I arrived here 15 years ago, but that's not to say it hasn't happened before, it's just unusual.

I think the following video was taken about a year and a half ago by a visiting observer from The University of Nottingham in the UK - they experienced a magnitude 4.4 earthquake underneath Mauna Kea during the run and the shear pins broke requiring a night-time fix by the observers. I remember being on the other end of the phone during this event! The stuff about the earthquake starts at about the 5-minute mark (and you'll see how physical effort at the summit is difficult!) but the whole video is interesting if you're curious about life on the summit!

California's Pacific Coast Highway - the sunny version

2011-10-10T18:38:00.009-10:00

Alright, a lot of pictures here so I won't say too much. Although the weather wasn't so good on our trip the fog did disappear on our last full day in Cambria so we took the opportunity to head back up north on the PCH to see what we missed in the fog. It was in the middle of the day so the light is a little harsh - I'd love to do this trip again around sunset - but it was nice to see the sun again! The panorama above was taken a little north of Cambria near San Simeon where elephant seals just love to hang out.

And make a lot of noise. And very strange noises as well. There's the honking you get from regular seals plus lots of chatter and then the most bizarre low-pitched gurgling noise from some of the bigger males. Maybe female seals find that sort of thing attractive, who am I to say?

The really weird thing about these animals is that you would watch one of the males spot a competitor or perhaps a female and start rushing over to it as only massive seals can do, but halfway there they would just stop, collapse into the sand and go to sleep. Twenty minutes later they would wake up and go at it again just to stop as suddenly as last time. Sometimes one would get as far as their target only to stop and fall asleep with their head resting on the seal they were after. Utterly bizarre but compelling viewing.

No gurgling from these guys. We stopped a little further north and met these bikers on their way south. Nice guys - they asked if I would autograph the picture I took of their bikes!

Time to stop and take a stroll down a trail. It didn't go anywhere other than to the edge of a cliff so I turned back (wuss!) and took a photo of the trip to come. Unfortunately this time of year the grasses and flowers are pretty colourless in California but it still looked pretty to me after all that British fog.

Nearby a remarkable white rock. Its colour is due to all the layers of ~~bird shit~~ guano that has built up over the years. There was me thinking it was some sort of interesting geological phenomenon. I think if I were a sea bird I might have moved on a few years ago...

No sea bird here. A couple of turkey vultures were circling way above us. Probably waiting for me to fall off the cliff.

Another stop, another photo of the drive to come and no restroom in sight (a loo for British readers).

I saw these grasses all over the place, at least I assume they're grass. Anyone know what they're called? I'm too lazy to look it up.

Pam told me that this had been a strange summer and early fall and that the coastline wasn't looking as brown as normal for this time of year. Well, you can make your own mind up, but I call this pretty brown. I'm hoping to visit again after the monsoon season.

This is as far north as we got on this particular drive - an overlook of the beach at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park and the famous waterfall. This place was recommended to me some time ago as a great place to take photos, and suspect it is - at sunset and without half a million tourists milling about (don't you just hate tourists?). Unfortunately the sunlight was still harsh so I've added a little vignetting to make it look half-interesting. I don't know what the designers of this place were thinking - you need to be there at sunset but it's miles away from a nice hotel room and decent bar, so given our priorities we headed back south for a night of debauchery with the locals at Mozzi's Saloon in Cambria and some verbal abuse from the Irish barman.

What a wonderful day!

Are you an optimist?

2011-10-09T22:26:00.002-10:00

I simply can't believe this article on the BBC website -maybe I'm being too pessimistic.

Brain 'rejects negative thoughts'

According to the article "They rated 14 people for their level of optimism and tested them in a brain scanner." Incidentally, the link in the article goes nowhere either, it just tells me that the DOI I asked for can't be found in the Handle System, whatever that is.

Fourteen people? They can't be serious, surely? I'm optimistic that a mistake has been made by the BBC, but if not can you really do a medical study and make a conclusion based on such a small number? The article says that 80% of people are optimists but how on earth can you say that based on 14 people? There's something wrong here...

Am I really back?

2011-10-07T22:40:00.005-10:00

Can't believe three weeks went by so quickly! I played this song a lot during the trip. I think Pam liked it although I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd got a slap on the face towards the end of the trip for playing it yet again...

California's Pacific Coast Highway - the foggy version

2011-10-07T19:16:00.007-10:00

I apologise for my apathy in not posting anything for the last two or three weeks but quite frankly I had better and much more enjoyable things to do! I've been back at work for the last few days which I'll admit has been very difficult to adjust to after such a wonderful trip, but anyway, let me go back to just after my last post...

So one thing I was really looking forward to was the trip south along the PCH from Carmel to Cambria - I know the drive but have only done it going north in the past and was told it's better to do it the other way simply because you're on the right hand side of the road and therefore nearer the ocean. What that person didn't tell me is that it meant the whole drive involved a rather intense feeling of vertigo throughout the drive and unfortunately not made any better by the thick fog we experienced. At least I knew what views we were missing but it was a real shame as this was going to be one of the highlights of the road trip. The picture above is what the place looked like last time...

...and this is how it looked on this trip (it's essentially the same spot and same view). Well, you know, it didn't matter, I had wonderful company which was the most important part of the journey and it's still a special drive, even if the conditions were distinctly British. At least it wasn't freezing cold and drizzling - that would have really reminded me of my home country!

Still, the coast looked interesting as long as we were down on the lower sections of the highway, out of the fog and the regime of vertigo (I never used to suffer from a fear of heights until a few years ago. Odd, isn't it?).

I would have tried to sit on this chair or whatever it is but it was far too close to the edge of the cliff so just used it to lean against (on the side away from the cliff edge) to take the photo above this (feel free to call me a wuss if you really must!).

The fog finally gave way to sunny skies when we were close to the small town of Cambria but the views aren't so spectacular here, so it was a quick trip down to the state beach in San Simeon to take in a little sun and watch the surf before checking in at our next hotel - and wasn't that the most wonderful place!

More later...

(As ever, you can click on the images to see larger versions).

A foggy view

2011-09-21T17:51:00.006-10:00

I'm a sucker for the the 17 Mile Drive in Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach, even when it's foggy and cold like today. Pam and I had planned to go on a whale watching cruise in the afternoon but thick fog and the fact we're both coming down with colds scuppered our plans so it was lunch at the Dametra Cafe in Carmel (highly recommended if you're in the area, one of the best and most fun restaurants I have ever visited) and then a trip to Pebble Beach.

Unfortunately, the last time I played golf was about 15 years ago and today I didn't have a spare $500 to spend hacking up the fairways and scaring everyone within a hundred yards with de-orbiting or worm-killing golf balls. Instead we spent a very pleasant two hours watching the fog and surf at one of the most beautiful and manicured places in the world.

Tomorrow brings a check of my bank balance, credit status and how much the California economy has improved since I've arrived. Then it's south on the PCH if I have any money left...

And I didn't check my email at work once today. Now that's an achievement I'm proud of!

An evening on the balcony

2011-09-19T17:37:00.006-10:00

Our vacation starts here - sunset on a balcony overlooking Carmel-by-the-Sea. San Francisco was amazing by the way - what a fantastic city!

(Yes, I know it's cheap wine but I've been overspending a tad - can't imagine how in a place life SF).

Outta here

2011-09-11T21:45:00.002-10:00

My usual youtube video for a California trip and just one of the best songs ever. I'll try and post a few pictures during the trip but will have other priorities! I've been looking forward to this for months and it's finally about to happen. Have fun while I'm gone, everyone!

Tom

It just seemed appropriate

2011-09-09T21:36:00.006-10:00

Not long now - 6 nights in San Francisco, a place I've never visited (except for the airport hotels) and then a 2-week road trip on the Pacific Coast Highway. The San Francisco part is work-related but am not complaining. The rest will be pure pleasure!

I found this on youtube. I have no problem admitting I've never been a fan of Tony Bennett, but given my location and the upcoming trip it just seemed appropriate. (You might want to wait for 45-seconds to see what I mean!).

In need of a vacation

2011-09-08T23:04:00.004-10:00

Wish I could embed this here but can't. It's a beautiful piece of music - Spanish guitar(*), jazz, Motown, a little rock & roll and some great electric guitar stuff from the early 70s. You'll recognize the song, I'm sure, and it's where I'm going to be for the next three weeks. For those who have followed my blog for a while, you'll know this is my favourite place in the world! I'm dreamin' about it as I write this...

George Benson, California Dreamin'

(*) When I was a kid, maybe around 9 or 10 years old, I could actually play a bit of Spanish Flamenco on my guitar. I gave it up to do other things (cricket and football, mainly) but about 10 years ago I found I could still play the same tunes. I guess it's like riding a bike. Then I gave it up again to do a bit of astronomy.

New science phenomenon: a jet-powered meteor with contrail

2011-08-26T21:19:00.005-10:00

Sometimes I just despair. This video of a "meteorite" was shown on the Daily Telegraph's website, a UK newspaper that's supposed to be above the usual tabloid nonsense (and I apologise for the advert if one appears).

It reminded me of the so-called "mystery missile launch over Los Angeles" a little while ago and all the nonsense that followed. Those of you with a pedantic nature may point out that it's not a meteorite but a meteor since rocks from space entering the atmosphere are only called a meteorite once they hit the ground, so if this is space rock it's a meteor. Fine, but it's neither, and may I make a suggestion for those looking to find where it landed?

First place I'd search is an airport.

Astronomy on Mauna Kea

2011-08-18T23:11:00.003-10:00

It seems those of us who work in the field of astronomy are nothing other than industrialists and/or working for the military. We're also addicts needing a 12-step recovery programme and are quite violent given this particular rant:

Big Island Chronicle letter

Nothing could be further from the truth of course, but this is a typical example of opposition to the TMT on Mauna Kea.

It seems to me that it's an argument about returning to the stone age versus understanding our universe and it'll be interesting to see who wins in the end.

An inside view of splitting light

2011-08-17T21:54:00.007-10:00

Top marks for anyone who can figure out what on earth this is. Ex-UKIRT employees are automatically disqualified. As you might be able to tell, I had auto-focus turned on and the camera had absolutely no idea what to focus on. I should have realised that would be a problem from the start...

Submillimeter Valley with sunset clouds

2011-08-16T21:12:00.002-10:00

Another shot from my time on Mauna Kea's summit last month. This is Submillimeter Valley although without the CSO which is just out of shot. The JCMT is bottom left and the SMA middle bottom. The clouds meant we couldn't observe this night but they did give us a spectacular sunset.

I want one of these

2011-08-15T21:13:00.002-10:00

It's my birthday soon. Anyone?

Riots in my home country

2011-08-10T23:19:00.003-10:00

There isn't much humour to be found in what's happening in the UK at the moment. I grew up in England near London and then spent many years in the north-west and then the east-midlands and those are the places the riots in England are occurring. I'm sure it's just a coincidence but maybe I forgot to turn off the gas when I left or something. Sorry!

In any case, you can always find something funny in any situation.

Just too busy...

2011-08-07T20:33:00.003-10:00

Not much to say I'm afraid other than I'm simply too busy to post anything substantial to my blog and that's been the way for a while now. Unfortunately I don't see things settling down too much in the near future although I do have another California trip coming up, and you can't imagine how much I'm looking forward to that break!

The picture above is yet another from the Celeste run at UKIRT in July. Hope you like it and hope you're all doing well!

Last light

2011-08-03T22:22:00.003-10:00

The Subaru telescope silhouetted by the setting sun and some mid-level clouds.

Missing the summit already...

2011-07-29T23:39:00.002-10:00

I still have some photos from that last summit trip I haven't looked at yet, but suspect this is one of the last good ones. It was wonderful to be back on the summit again and am now getting used to life back at sea level. Lots of admin type stuff to deal with, which I hate, but it comes with the job these days.

This one was taken well after sunset - all the colours had gone and it was very dark so things are a little smoothed (OK, out of focus). Shortly after this I was back inside the control room hoping to take data on a few planets but the clouds that were above us at sunset descended in the cold air and then hung around the summit all night, so we didn't get anything this night. Fortunately, I can report that the visiting NASA team got some great data soon after this and it coincided with me leaving the summit, so I think I might have to review any future summit support that includes me.

Oh well. It was fun while it lasted!

Summit tourists

2011-07-24T22:38:00.004-10:00

At $200 a head I hope these guys enjoyed the sunset! We like to give them a show at UKIRT (pictured) by opening the dome and ventilation system early. It always attracts attention when the dome slit opens. I haven't the heart to tell them it's not for them, though, we open early so the dome cools down and we don't have to deal with local turbulence once the sky turns dark. Between dome opening time and a dark sky I try to stay incognito - I'm fed up answering questions about UFOs, black holes and my accent!

Fiery sunsets

2011-07-20T22:05:00.007-10:00

Three sunset pictures from the last few days of the Celeste run at UKIRT. Not my best but it was really windy on those days. The winds calmed down on the last couple of nights but the clouds had dissipated by then so the sunsets were kind of boring and I didn't bother - I was also a little busy those nights. You never know, maybe this time next year I'll get another chance to take some Mauna Kea sunset shots!

Subaru and a setting sun. The Subaru observatory is closed right now due to a nasty incident they had with some glycol. I hope things get fixed and cleaned up soon. I was told they might be looking at being closed for six-months but they have recently sent out an email about their next laser show later this month, so am assuming they'll be open again very soon.

The NASA IRTF with some summit-level clouds at sunset. It almost looks as though there's a brush fire nearby, but the colours are simply due to the sunset. Despite a good forecast most of the summit observatories remained closed this night due to fog although one or two managed to open towards dawn when the clouds finally decided to leave.

The CFHT the same evening. It had an amazing glow from sunset clouds in the valley but thick mid-level clouds everywhere else made opening up impossible.

Incidentally, our visitors from NASA Goddard went home today very happy especially after a great last night on the summit. Conditions were excellent and they took a lot of superb data on Saturn and its storm, Uranus and Jupiter. I even found a little time to take some more data on Pluto not that I'm a planetary scientist or anything, just wanted to see how our image quality was holding up and if there were any changes. Pluto and its moon Charon were pretty obvious in the 2.2-micron data.

UKIRT by moonlight

2011-07-17T23:31:00.004-10:00

Saturday evening, July 16th 8:30 pm Hawaiian Standard Time, 2011. Most people are out on the town enjoying themselves, having fun with family at home or at a party. Me? I thought I'd pop outside and take a photo of UKIRT observing Saturn with the Celeste visiting instrument. You can even see my shadow if you look carefully enough!

Apart from the odd day or two I've spent the last two and a half weeks on Mauna Kea and have just got down for a bit of a break. The NASA Goddard team are still on the summit of Mauna Kea and from a report I got just minutes ago have taken some stunning data on Saturn's super storm. Tonight is their last night at UKIRT so it seems all the effort they and we have put into making this happen has been worth it.

Now it's time to relax and take a couple of days off work before getting UKIRT back to remote operations. I may even have another Mauna Kea sunset picture or two to post in the next day or so...

Poor timimg

2011-07-14T01:02:00.003-10:00

I don't know what you think, but I thought this picture was crap until I looked at it again and thought, hmm, interesting...

The other day I went out to watch the sunset as I always try to do when I'm at the summit. Unfortunately I was a little rushed this time as we'd been dealing with several telescope and instrument complications and problems but just had enough time to set the camera on the tripod and take a few pictures. The scene was wonderful until I realised my camera wasn't working as it should. The sun was still above the high clouds and the colours were amazing but the memory card in my camera was screwed, at least that was my initial diagnosis.

So I rushed back into the dome to get a replacement card ("rushed" being a relative term at 14,000 feet) and a couple of minutes later managed to walk with somewhat wobbly legs back to the camera. Oh boy, it's so easy to forget how little oxygen there is at the summit. One of the Celeste visiting instrument team members had kindly stood guard next to my camera while I was gone but probably thought there was some drunk summit madman heading towards him until I got close enough for him to recognise me.

I need to talk to the summit management team about some comfortable benches...

Anyway - too late - the sun had appeared below the mid-level clouds so the scene was gone but I took a couple of pictures anyway before I went into a coma. This is one of them.

I still don't know if it's crap or not.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day

2011-07-12T22:03:00.002-10:00

Just another picture of the NASA IRTF I'm afraid (taken yesterday), but wait, almost 20 years ago to the day a person who is currently up at UKIRT taking data was at the IRTF with an instrument called Celeste. That was 11th July 1991, but tonight, July 12 2011, Celeste is at UKIRT. Don't worry, it has been upgraded a little bit since then!

11th July 1991 is an important date in astronomy, especially for the telescopes that existed back then on Mauna Kea - it was the first total eclipse of the sun observed by major astronomical observatories. NASA scientist Don Jennings, who I'm sure is fretting and stressing getting Celeste to work on UKIRT, is, as I write this, working frenetically inside our dome. Actually, I'm sure that isn't the case, he's one of the most laid back people I've met and hasn't aged a day since this Nova episode of the 1991 eclipse was made in which he's a co-star.

It's a look back in time for me - 1991 was when I first visited UKIRT as a postgraduate student although it was a few months before the eclipse. Now I'm in charge of the place. How things change in such a short time.

For anyone interested, Don first appears at around the 07:50 minute mark in the video and then again at approx. 20:40 and 29:30. Then it gets exiting around the 33:40 minute mark and continues from there on switching between the various Mauna Kea eclipse observing teams. At around 46 minutes they do what I would have done had I been up there although of course I'd have done it in a stately English manner with a cup of tea in my hand and a comment to everyone along the lines of "jolly well done!".

Although it's very dated now, the video does give a reasonable impression of life at a Mauna Kea observatory, especially when there's a new project to be done which is exactly what I've been doing the last couple of weeks. I'm completely knackered because of it, but it's been tremendous fun and tonight we're starting to get the science data we've been preparing for the last couple of weeks!

Clouds and fog

2011-07-12T00:26:00.004-10:00

Tell you what, the weather's been pretty awful up here the last couple of nights, but the sunsets have been to kill for...

Pluto and Charon

2011-07-07T21:27:00.006-10:00

I'm currently taking a 24-hr break from the summit of Mauna Kea. It's ironic because for the last few months since UKIRT switched to remote operations I've really missed being on the mountain, but in a fit of telescope and instrument commissioning I've been up there for the last week and needed a short break at sea level before heading back up there again for the majority of the next 10 days. Anyway, the cats missed me...

We're hoping to do a little planetary science over the next week or so using an instrument designed and built by NASA scientists called Celeste. It's a mid-infrared high-resolution spectrograph designed to identify molecules in planetary atmospheres. I'm no planet expert but do have a background in spectroscopy and mid-infrared astronomy so am eager to help make this little venture work before we go back to surveying the infrared universe for UKIDSS with WFCAM. Plus this is fun if a little exhausting. Commissioning astronomical instruments has always been the most enjoyable part of my career in the past, and it's nice to get a chance to do something like that again.

As part of the preparations, UKIRT had to be converted back to Cassegrain mode for a couple of weeks and that involves a lot of night time calibration and testing work. On our first night after the conversion we did every measurement and calibration possible other than reshaping the primary mirror to take into account gravity. The latter takes several hours of observations and couldn't be done right at the start but despite that Jack (the telescope operator) and myself thought we'd have a quick test of the telescope by taking some infrared images of Pluto using a facility instrument called UFTI. I didn't expect much, after all the primary and secondary mirrors hadn't been calibrated, but we had a nice surprise!

In the top image, Pluto and its moon, Charon, are easily seen. Charon wasn't discovered until 1978 and even then the discovery was controversial. Ground-based telescopes are always subject to the effects of the atmosphere and until quite recently resolving Pluto and Charon was a very difficult task. Imagine my surprise when the automatic data reduction software spat out the image above (oh, OK, it didn't have the circle in it!). Remember, the telescope wasn't ready for this type of observation, I just wanted to see what image quality we had before working on the engineering models for the mirrors. I was also curious to see if we could figure out how to find Pluto in the first place!

The second image is actually two images combined. I wanted to make sure that we were actually looking at Pluto so we took another image a few minutes later; the idea being that the stars should stay in the same place but Pluto and Charon would have moved with respect to the background stars. They did and we could still see Charon.

OK, not as exciting as the most distant quasar ever seen, but given it's been nearly three years since we were last in this mode, the telescope had just been handed over by the engineers and I'd forgotten everything about running things in Cassegrain mode, I was rather impressed!

This is a close up of the K-band image of the Pluto-Charon system. The images are a little elongated but that's because we hadn't done the wavefront sensing at this point. For those who know a little about optics, there's some coma and astigmatism in the images which I hope are now removed after last night's engineering observations. For those that know little about astronomy, here's a little spiel I wrote for our staff:

Pluto, now classified as a dwarf planet, is approximately 2.9 billion miles away at the moment and it takes light over four hours to reach us from there, just to give you some idea of the scale of our Solar system. It's about a fifth the diameter of the Earth and its mass is only about a fifth of our own moon. Charon is only about 750 miles across and only about a fiftieth of the mass of our own moon.

Tomorrow night it's back to commissioning and engineering and after that hopefully some world-beating planetary science. And then maybe I can get some sleep...

As high as a kite

2011-07-06T21:28:00.003-10:00

Not something you see every day. A kite flying high above the CFHT around sunset earlier this evening. Apparently, and I quote a CFHT source, "This is just to characterize the wind". Scientists, I don't know...

High over its cloudy domain

2011-07-05T22:00:00.003-10:00

The NASA IRTF waiting for sunset high atop Mauna Kea on Independence Day evening. Haleakala on Maui is visible in the distance. A photo of the IRTF seemed appropriate as I've been working with a group of NASA scientists on the mountain since late last week.

Back above the clouds

2011-07-03T20:38:00.002-10:00

Subaru and sunset clouds taken a short while ago just after sunset on Mauna Kea's summit. It's been a long time!

Baking at 14,000 feet

2011-07-01T22:14:00.002-10:00

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday I reported that we had ice on or near our wavefront sensor which would make it impossible to align the telescope, but an overnight bake on our oven fixed the problem, and the image above shows the result. Now I have to figure out the mirror-image results of the N, S, E and W markings and why the E is the wrong way round!

More importantly, the secondary mirror could now be aligned. It turned out I didn't have to make any large adjustment at all, our engineers reinstalled it perfectly. The bright circle in the middle, which is the secondary, has to be centered between those bars, and it was almost spot on first go. In addition, our 1-2.5 micron camera, UFTI, is back on the telescope and working perfectly and while all this is going on a filter problem with WFCAM seems to have been fixed or at least a work around has been found. All this in four days.

At the end of the afternoon I fully expected us to still have some problems, you have to remember it's been 30 months since we were last in this mode (Cassegrain) and everything has been updated since then. Thanks to a wonderful group of technicians, engineers and software people we left the mountain late this afternoon with everything working perfectly.

Given all this work is for a couple of weeks of night time observing while WFCAM is undergoing planned maintenance, the effort everyone has put in is phenomenal. Despite all the cutbacks and uncertainty about our future, we still have the most incredibly talented and dedicated staff. After fifteen years working with them I'm still in awe of what they can do.

Ice in the works

2011-06-30T20:56:00.004-10:00

After spending two-and-a-half years somewhere in UKIRT's attic the wavefront sensor was brought out today and installed on the telescope. This is a relatively simple instrument that allows one to align the telescope and take out-of-focus images of the primary mirror which helps us to see any optical aberrations caused by the primary and secondary mirrors and correct them. The good news is everything worked first time, all the mechanisms moved correctly and I could take data. The bad news is that during the long hiatus moisture got into the CCD housing and since the detector is electronically cooled below the freezing point of water, ice formed very close to the CCD. You can tell it's close since the image shows ice crystals in focus (if they had been anywhere else, they would be out of focus and the image would just be one big blur). The good news again is that the ice is in the detector housing, it's a relatively easy problem to fix. The housing is already being baked in an oven to remove the water (yes, an oven, but not quite the same as you have in your kitchen!) .

Tomorrow the instrument will be put back together and I'll try again. I did try to take some images to see if I could at least align the secondary mirror, but it was all too blurry so will wait until tomorrow.

This is an image, taken through the ice, of the primary mirror covers. If the ice wasn't there you'd see marking indicating north, south, east and west and some markers to help me align the secondary (the lighted circle in the middle). The four black lines are the secondary vanes, the structure that holds the secondary mirror at the top of the telescope structure and the things that give rise to diffraction spikes you see in almost all astronomical images of bright stars.

In the meantime, my good friend Paul Hirst appeared on TV today, he often comments on this blog so you may have seen his contributions in the past plus I have been known to show a photo or two of his! I think he did a great job in the interview, especially as he didn't forget his old stomping ground, UKIRT.

You can see the interview via this KITV link.

It was nice to get back to the summit again although I have to admit I felt the altitude, it's been a long time since I was last up there. Back again tomorrow to see if the wavefront sensor works and then again on Sunday to begin a long shift back on the mountain. I'm looking forward to it and will try and post a few photos!

The most distant super-massive black hole ever discovered

2011-06-29T20:39:00.017-10:00

Note - this posted yesterday but blogger was well and truly broken, so reposting now.

Artist's impression of the newly discovered quasar from the ESO press release.

I mentioned yesterday there was going to be a press release today, in fact there have been more than one but all are based on the discovery of a redshift seven quasar using UKIRT and subsequent followups at other telescopes. Just google "ulas quasar" and you'll see the news is everywhere although first point of call should be to the e-astronomers blog post (Andy Lawrence) as he's the head of UKIDSS, the survey in which the quasar was found. A little physics background can be also found at Peter Coles' blog.

This is a great result for both UKIDSS and UKIRT, something everyone in the respective teams should be proud of. Although not the most distant object ever detected (it's certainly way up in the list though) its redshift means it was formed not long after the big bang yet if our understanding of the physics is correct, there really wasn't enough time for an object as massive as this to form. As is often the case, an exiting science discovery leaves us with even more questions to answer.

I'd include the video from the ESO press release including the strange underwater sounds but Blogger is broken yet again and can't upload things properly. The video can be seen in Peter's blog. Remember, in space no one can hear you scream.

PS. It's now on youtube so enjoy the strange sound effects!

UKIRT science news

2011-06-28T23:15:00.002-10:00

Watch out for a press release tomorrow, something about a quasar. UKIRT played a large role in this and it all looks rather exciting. There's also another story about a GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) which I haven't had time to get on the UKIRT home page, but hope to shortly along with the news about the quasar.

I even had the local rag call me today but couldn't tell them an awful lot since I hadn't actually seen the press release, but sure I'll be quoted as saying something I never said, or maybe wish I hadn't said.

More tomorrow, feeling very sleep-deprived right now.

Mystery picture

2011-06-24T22:05:00.003-10:00

100 points to whoever can identify what this is. 1000 points to the person with the most amusing answer! -10 points to anyone who spoils the fun.

Do you need a clue? Well, I'll be analyzing images like this in just over a week and will likely post a few more like this to show how a telescope is made to work, well, maybe. I might post a few sunset pictures as well.

As for my health, thanks to everyone's comments and email. I think I'm almost back to where I was before this illness or whatever it was hit me and am certainly feeling much happier with things despite a rather heavy workload right now. I'm smiling again so think that means I'm almost there!

It feels like years...

2011-06-16T20:47:00.005-10:00

...since I was last here. That's means both posting on my blog and the summit of Mauna Kea. And just picking up a camera. I haven't done that for ages and still haven't, the panorama above is from a year ago with the old camera although I thought I'd remind myself how to use my computer again and reprocess a couple of pictures. I think my conclusion tonight is my photo-processing work flow is extraordinarily complicated and need to do something about it, because I couldn't remember one step from another. It'll likely take me a few months just to remember how to operate the shutter on my camera again.

So, just to update everyone, I'm better than I was two months ago but have hit a plateau. My head still hurts, probably due to overuse of my intellectually-challenged brain, but it's nowhere near as bad as before, it's just that there's been little change during the last three or four weeks.

British beer didn't help, nor did some nice wine and the most wonderful company. Jet-lag certainly wasn't a cure either but a trip to the UK and a couple of days in LA certainly took my mind off things, so in that respect I'm really happy I decided to travel halfway round the world and back again. It was with American Airlines as well, so if their level of providing passenger discomfort didn't make things worse, I think I'm good to go anywhere! I'm just so pleased my flight back from Blighty was on British Airways, at least as far as LA. They know how to make a nice cup of tea and provide entertainment during an eleven hour flight. Whoever chooses the movies shown on AA flights needs the sack.

Well, as you can probably tell, my brain isn't quite what it used to be, but with the help of the US health care system and given a lot of time, I'm confident it'll be back to where it was a few months ago with the additional stress of paying the medical bills. If they become excessive I can always start taking the Vicodin again, that way I won't worry about a thing!

I doubt I'll be posting an awful lot in the next month or so, but, despite the STFC's best efforts, I might actually be able to spend a few nights back on Mauna Kea's summit next month. If that happens I'll be able to bore you once again with some more summit pictures. Hope you don't mind.

Thanks again to everyone who's dropped a line or two in the last few weeks and my apologies if I didn't reply to you - as you can imagine it's been a difficult time but I really appreciate all your thoughts. They have meant a lot to me.

Tom

Update

2011-05-25T22:03:00.002-10:00

I've had the odd email asking how I'm doing and I really apologise for not letting people know earlier. To be honest I've simply not had the energy to post something until now.

I'm back at work but am still not myself. I still have considerable pain in the right hand side of my head but it's nothing compared to what I had a few weeks ago. My concentration and focus is shot right now but it is coming back and the good thing is I no longer need to take pain killers every three or four hours, so there's a definite improvement. Incidentally, I gave up with the really strong stuff some weeks ago - it was too mind-altering.

The diagnosis hasn't changed but I haven't seen the doctor for a couple of weeks because I think he gave up on me and to be honest, vice versa. That's Big Island health care for you.

Thanks to everyone who's commented and/or emailed me, I really appreciate your thoughts and probably much more than you realise. Sorry if I haven't replied but will try to do so in the coming weeks - work is taking over for a bit which is a good thing I think!

Tom

The diagnosis

2011-05-09T20:34:00.002-10:00

After nearly two weeks of excruciating and relentless head pain, dizziness and occasional nausea I woke up on Saturday morning in a cold sweat but completely free of pain. The pain started to return later in the day but since then has never reached the levels of the last couple of weeks and today I haven't even needed any painkillers.

I met my doctor today and was told my CT scan was clear which was great news, and of course I'd been quite anxious about this for a few days - you start thinking of all sorts of things that might be wrong while waiting. The only downside to this, of course, is that since it was clear it didn't explain what's wrong.

So, my doctor's initial diagnosis when I first saw him nearly two weeks ago is the one we're going with - shingles. The only problem with that is that I have no rash but apparently this can happen on occasions plus it's possible treatment was started early enough that it prevented the rash from appearing in the first place. If that's the case, thumbs up to my doc!

I'll be returning to work later this week although I've been told to take it easy for a while, and thanks for all your comments, thoughts and prayers in the meantime, they were all very much appreciated!

Discombobulated

2011-05-05T00:41:00.002-10:00

Think it's now up to four different diagnoses yet the pain gets worse (and I have taken the baseball bat away from the cats). The Doc now has me on the hard stuff which certainly has some interesting side effects. I tried to steam some vegetables this evening without using any steam and left several empty plastic bags in the fridge along with my cell phone. Odd thing is I remember doing it, just not the reason why.

CT scan tomorrow and maybe when the results come in (Monday) I'll have a better idea what's going on. Have to admit I'm a little scared although I can now walk in a straight line which is better than a few days ago.

This sucks

2011-04-30T02:54:00.003-10:00

Imagine you're in bed and want to change position and your head gets slammed with a baseball bat instead. You need to visit the bathroom and if you survive the battering on getting up you then deal with extreme dizziness because you're now on your own two feet and your mind doesn't know if the bathroom is in front or behind you and can't figure out why the room is spinning. You're then rewarded with another slam of the baseball bat just because you have to pee (don't ask about no. 2). Even a simple cough or yawn means another swipe to the head. Blowing your nose is out of the question unless you enjoy screaming - and that will invite another blow to the head as well. Just turning your head a few degrees - wham!

This is like nothing I've ever experienced before and hope will never experience again, and I hope none of you do either. When I'm confident the diagnosis I've been given is the right one I'll let you know what it is, because you don't want this.

The cats are becoming a little pissed off with me I think, but maybe this is what's really going on:

Recluse

2011-04-27T18:51:00.002-10:00

I haven't posted much recently and unlikely to do so for a little while. For most of last week I felt as though I'd been in a car wreck although didn't feel particularly ill. Unfortunately this culminated in a very frightening episode on Easter Sunday during which I thought I was in real trouble. Today I've finally received a diagnosis which seems to make sense and if it's correct have a week or two of hell in front of me but after that should start to recover. Hopefully I'll be back posting regularly soon!

Landing in Hilo, Hawaii

2011-04-20T20:54:00.019-10:00

Still too busy to do much photography or write blog posts, but I did come across this today and enjoyed the video. Not so sure about the music, it's not my kind of stuff, but found myself swaying to it after a minute or two!

Hilo doesn't see too many large jets although there is a daily FedEx service and suspect this is taken from the flight deck of one of those flights. Some of you who read my blog will no doubt be familiar with the flight into Hilo (although perhaps not from the front of the plane) but for those who aren't, the flights generally parallel the Hamakua coast on the north east side of the island until getting to North Hilo and then turn south into Hilo Bay which is where this video takes things up. Then, at the last minute, there's a left turn over Hilo's shoreline to line up with the runway as they fly over Ken's House of Pancakes, one of the more popular restaurants in Hilo!

You can't see my house from here, but for the approach into Hilo Bay part, my house would be on the horizon to the left a few miles beyond Hilo. Mauna Kea is out of sight on the right.

Although my camera hasn't been out of the house for a week or two now, I did collect some recent pictures of the Hawaii coastline and put them in a Flickr slideshow. I think all the pictures have appeared on this blog before, but feel free to take a look using the following link - Hawaii coastline.

Surreal sunset

2011-04-12T21:39:00.003-10:00

This is another shot from over a month ago over at Waikoloa. It was one of the strangest sunsets I've ever seen. An approaching front plus a bank of vog a few hundreds yards out to sea made things look very surreal. Two weeks later Pam and I visited again but we couldn't get here because the beach was closed after the tsunami. I haven't been back since. I wonder what it looks like now?

The rough and the smooth

2011-04-11T21:37:00.005-10:00

Been a little busy recently so my apologies for not posting much. I haven't even picked up my camera for the last week so you know things must be bad! Actually, nothing bad is happening, just lots of things going on combined with some bad weather. I actually made it back to the summit last week, but only for a couple of hours and it was nasty. Winds were gusting to 60-mph, it was very cold and foggy, so even if I had my camera I doubt I'd have taken any pictures. It was nice to see UKIRT again though. I miss the place.

In the meantime, a nice warm post-sunset shot from Waikoloa taken a month ago...

I think we're in for a pasting

2011-04-06T18:45:00.003-10:00

Thunder is rumbling all around, flash flood watches and warnings have been issued and the rain is starting to increase. It's snowing at the summit of Mauna Kea and I closed UKIRT for the night several hours ago. We received warning emails all afternoon as the day crews evacuated the various observatories.

Given my house seems to be a natural lightning conductor, I think I'll be shutting down for the night as well...

UKIRT: publication record smashed

2011-04-05T20:55:00.002-10:00

I'm a bit behind with things I'm afraid, but since I hinted about news of UKIRT's productivity almost two months ago it's only right I post the final result. It turns out that the number of publications in 2010 that use UKIRT data has beaten our previous record. In fact it's fair to say the record has been smashed.

Our previous record was 84 peer-reviewed publications which occurred in 1997 and was then repeated in 2009 when UKIDSS really got going. Last year (2010) there were 118 papers. Given all the cutbacks UKIRT has suffered over the last few years I think this is quite a remarkable result.

Counting publications to measure observatory productivity may not be the best method but it is what most other observatories do so does enable us to measure productivity relative to other observatories (and UKIRT has always done very well in this respect). Peter Coles wrote an interesting piece about using publications very recently although it was aimed more at UKIDSS than UKIRT (UKIRT and UKIDSS do not use the same methodology for counting papers although the majority of UKIDSS papers end up being counted as UKIRT publications).

In any case, the huge increase in publications demonstrates that UKIRT is more productive than ever and something all of those that have worked at the telescope over the years should be very proud of.

Pau hana

2011-04-03T21:04:00.003-10:00

In the islands "Pau Hana" translates to "after work". I live on the wrong side of the island to watch a sunset after work since it takes too long to drive there, but the sunsets on the windward side aren't too bad either...

Maui, Kahoolawe and Molokini

2011-04-01T22:17:00.004-10:00

Another shot from Makena on Maui. Who wouldn't want to live here? Unfortunately, as pointed out by a good friend and colleague, it seems you have to open your wallet every time you take a breath there. It's not the cheapest place to spend a vacation...

Kahoolawe is the island on the left, Molokini to the right. A glorious sunset sky towards the top and an empty wallet down below in my pocket!

More cuts to the science budget

2011-04-01T00:01:00.001-10:00

Despite all our hard work in keeping UKIRT operating over the last few years and our change to Minimalist Mode described here and here, the UK government has seen fit to cut back even further. I don't know how we'll deal with this since Minimalist Mode really means that - we can't cut back any more.

By the end of the year UKIRT will have to reduce the size of its primary mirror to less than two metres. For three decades UKIRT was the largest dedicated infrared telescope on the planet with a primary of around 3.8 metres (about 12.5 feet) but the UK government has decided that this costs too much to maintain, so by the start of 2012 the diameter of the mirror must be reduced to save costs. This will save money in both staff and utility costs as there will be less of a mirror to clean, fewer staff will be needed given the reduced area to operate and utility bills will reduce by about a factor of four given the reduction in primary mirror area.

There is also a rumour going around that all of our computer monitors will be reduced in size by a similar amount to save electricity. In the meantime I have been asked to look at shortening the length of the fibres between Hilo and the summit of Mauna Kea as a further cost-cutting exercise and one possibility is using a company such as FedEx or UPS to transfer our data down from the summit after each night and thereby bypassing the need for a fast and expensive network connection entirely.

On the brighter side we managed to fight off one of the other proposals in the government scheme which was to keep the dome closed during the night in order to save heating costs.

This will be an interesting year to say the least...

Marooned

2011-03-30T21:56:00.002-10:00

This used to be a beach. Behind it was a large Hawaiian fish pond - basically it was a beach and behind it a large lagoon. I walked along the beach a few days before the Japan earthquake and tsunami to take a couple of the pictures here and here.

I took Pam to the Waikoloa Beach Marriott for a few days because she couldn't come along for a conference I attended there at the beginning of the month although that was the original plan. When we arrived I asked one of the hotel staff members if they had any damage from the tsunami and they said the beach had gone but other than that there was no damage. Other places on the Kona coast were less lucky: one very popular hotel has had to shut down due to damage and it's not clear if it will open again. Many houses were severely damaged or destroyed and one was see floating in the ocean in Captain Cook. Damage here is estimated at several tens of millions of dollars but it is hard to write this given the catastrophe in Japan. Due to the advance warning the Hawaiian Islands received, no one was killed here and as far as I know there was only one injury.

Hawaii will likely see a significant financial hit over the next few months as tourism from Japan plays a large part in our economy. Jobs have already been lost due to the immediate effects of the tsunami and I suspect more will be lost as the effects propagate over time. As I've already mentioned though, there is no comparison between what has happened here and the disaster in Japan. My heart still sinks whenever I see pictures and video from there. It's simply beyond belief what that country experienced and continues to do so.

Makena, Maui

2011-03-28T21:51:00.003-10:00

We spent our last afternoon on Maui on a whale watching cruise run by the Pacific Whale Foundation. More on that in another post (it was a wonderful cruise) but the trip had left me a little sunburned, wet and tired and had planned an early evening for a couple of mai tais at the bar. In the end, however, we drove down to Makena on the south west side of Maui to watch the sunset. It was glorious!

The island of Lanai in the distance with the gentle surf rolling over the rocky shoreline.

The sun setting behind the clouds with Molokini on the horizon. I went snorkeling there many years ago and it was an unforgettable experience.

The last picture before heading to the bar!

Pam's flying back over the Pacific ocean as I write this. As always it'll take a few days days getting used to being single again and getting back into the swing of things at work. No matter what, our Maui trip will stay in our memories for many years to come.

Sometimes you just need a break

2011-03-26T22:43:00.003-10:00

My apologies for going off air but I've been on vacation - Waikoloa and Maui. It's certainly been an interesting two weeks which started off with the tsunami from the Japan earthquake, watching an idiot flip his expensive car over several times and being the first one there to try and rescue him from an upside down car and then a lot of time in the sun in Waikoloa (Big Island) and Kihei (Maui) with wonderful company.

I've seen some of the damage the tsunami has done to the Kona side of this island, the damage in some places is severe but given the catastrophe in Japan it's simply not worth writing about, we were so lucky.

For those of you waiting for email from me, sorry again, but Pam and I needed the time off and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. All I'll tell you right now is that we had a wonderful vacation!

Tsunami evacuation

2011-03-10T22:42:00.002-10:00

Just to let any friends and colleagues of mine that might happen to read this blog know that Pam and I are aware of the tsunami that is on its way to Hawaii after the massive and tragic earthquake in Japan. We will be evacuating shortly and moving inland. Fingers crossed this won't be too bad.

Waikoloa Beach

2011-03-06T21:49:00.003-10:00

Actually, beaches, but despite living on Hawaii Island for nearly 15 years now I'd never visited this place before. The picture above shows one of the beaches shortly before sunset. It was empty apart from a few surfers off in the distance. The vog that seemed to be hanging a mile or so off the coast made for quite a strange looking scene but the beach was pretty enough. Just beware that there's little sand, just lots of white coral that'll rip your knees to shreds if you lose your footing, as I nearly did a couple of times. The coral is razor sharp and on the steep parts of the beach will give way without warning. It's a beautiful place nevertheless and wonderfully devoid of tourists!

Same place an hour later. The sunset was not spectacular so was packing up when suddenly the high cirrus clouds lit up, so out came the camera again and just got this shot in time. I tried to take a panorama but by the time I'd taken the first picture the clouds were dark again. It was literally a two minute window when the clouds looked like this.

This is from the beach near the Waikoloa hotel I was staying at. No razor sharp coral to worry about but the sunset was crap. There were a bunch of us there to watch as the previous night's sunset had been so spectacular but this time a mixture of vog and an approaching front meant the sun disappeared behind the clouds well before sunset. Oh well, I did the best I could do in the circumstances. I'm hoping to revisit the place next week.

New Kilauea fissure eruption

2011-03-06T18:21:00.011-10:00

Kilauea volcano showed some dramatic changes in behaviour yesterday when the crater floor of Pu'u O'o collapsed followed by a dramatic drop in the level of the lava lake at Kilauea's summit. This meant the lava had to be draining off somewhere and sure enough, shortly afterwards a fissure eruption began between the summit and Pu'u O'o. Some of the action was captured by the scientists at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory:

USGS video of the fissure eruption, March 5th.

Not sure I would have been standing where that video was taken! There are plenty more pictures and videos of the current activity at the USGS HVO site and an update is posted each day on the activity. Also worth a look are the webcams the scientists have set up in the Volcano National Park.

PS. The BBC have also picked up on the story with a nice video.

PPS. Another amazing video from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory scientists. I've had to watch it over and over again just to pick up on all the stuff that's going on. There's another helicopter in the scene which helps to provide a scale.

PPPS. New picture courtesy of the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory:

Roller coaster week

2011-03-05T00:28:00.003-10:00

Things are looking up. The last week has been difficult to say the least but thanks to the wonderful staff at the JAC I'm feeling good this weekend! I also did try to take a couple of sunset shots the other day but couldn't come up with anything better than this taken over in Waikoloa.

Anyway, thanks for your kind comments and especially to those that helped both Pam and myself through a very tough few days. If you had seen me on Monday and Tuesday earlier this week you would have known what a complete wreck I was. Yet by the end of the week I'm just about back to normal thanks to all of you! Our chief engineer, Simon, has special thanks for giving my talk at a conference this week. I've paid him back with a few beers but I really am still in his debt.

My quiet place

2011-02-25T23:38:00.002-10:00

Some bad personal news, an upcoming conference (which I may or may not be able to attend) and all sorts of upcoming stuff means I'll likely be off air for a week or two. Thank you to my regular readers for being, well, regular readers, and I always appreciate your comments.

I'll be back sooner rather than later I hope.

Tom

UKIRT remote operations - an update

2011-02-23T22:04:00.005-10:00

It was around June last year I first wrote about our switch to remote operations, or more formally, "Minimalist Mode". I've written a few posts since about the change but do you think I'll really list them all? Oh well, here are one or two:

Remote possibility

Good and bad timing

Last of the breed

Something sort of official.

Things have gone remarkably well, so well that I'm confident enough to give a talk next week to a hundred plus astronomers and engineers although I haven't quite figured out what they want to hear or what I want to say to them. Should be an interesting meeting nevertheless but this isn't want I wanted to talk about. What I do want to point out is a remarkable statistic that has caught me by surprise. In fact I'm astonished, but this is all down to our amazing engineering crew.

Like most professional observatories UKIRT keeps track of its fault rate. It's defined as the loss of clear time available for science observing that is due to technical faults. Many observatories run at a fault rate of 5% which is seen as very good. UKIRT, for many years now, has run at around the 2% level. This is exceptional especially given its remote location on top of a 14,000 foot mountain which suffers arctic-like conditions for much of the year.

With the switch to remote operations I fully expected this fault rate to increase and quite significantly so. We did everything we could to make sure all our known failure modes could be fixed remotely but there are some that simply can't be dealt with that way. To make things worse, in an El Nina year like this, weather conditions can be so bad at the summit that 1) they cause serious faults through icing, high winds, water inundation etc., things sensitive electronic devices hate; 2) the weather causes so much lost time that any small fault invariably loses more time as a percentage of clear time than it would during the summer and 3) our reduced staff numbers would mean faults would take longer to fix.

Despite the list, the fault rate continues at around the 2% level and if I leave out one serious fault that was a one-time failure and had nothing to do with remote operations, our already exceptionally small fault rate is now down at the 1% level since remote operations began. This is not what I expected, am still somewhat befuddled by it but am proud to announce it.

This is all due to an exceptional group of people that work at UKIRT and the JAC, especially our engineers and technicians but it's also due to the community that use UKIRT. Tomorrow I hope to post a comment or two from our observers that show what a special place this is and how many great scientific careers UKIRT has launched. It's knowing that we still contribute in that way while still making new scientific discoveries each night that keeps us motivated.

Thank you.

Adding to my rock collection

2011-02-22T21:18:00.003-10:00

Don't worry, I'll get through this phase in my life soon!

Seriously, I'm actually being a good scientist and just experimenting with the new toy. For pictures like this, a 0.3 to 0.4-sec exposure seems to be perfect for capturing the movement of the water but not always enough to capture the dark lava rocks. Anyway, think I have something to work on now!

Both pictures were taken at one of my favourite places on the planet, the Puna coast between Kalapana and Kapoho. It was sunset but since this is on the east side of the island I wasn't going to capture a glorious sunset from here (sigh, I miss the summit of Mauna Kea!) but when the light starts to dip at least it allows for some longer exposures which gives one an impression of movement in the water.

Not sure what to move onto next. Someone suggested historic Hilo buildings. That's an idea I'll look at but am not sure what's historic or not and in any case I'll still be pining for my sunsets!

My happy place

2011-02-21T00:30:00.003-10:00

I'm a realist and an atheist. I don't think there's any reason we live here other than we just do. I've little time for new age philosophies, will give you an evil look if you say my chakra is misaligned (or my stars) and believe karma only exists for those that believe in a virtual reality, and I'm not one of them.

Having said that, there is a special place here on the Big Island of Hawaii I'll visit when my chakra and karma are all messed up and my energy vortexes and dilateral cosmic planetary alignments aren't what they usually are. Even when they're retrograde.

It's the coastline between Kalapana and Kapoho in Puna. It's just the most beautiful place on the planet (despite all the hippies that live there) and always enjoy a sense of regeneration and rejuvenation when I visit - sometimes well beyond sunset:

Oh, enough of that. My virgo star sign karmatic dispositional synergies and photonic conscious polar-energies are telling me it's time to go to bed.

Searching for something new

2011-02-19T23:05:00.004-10:00

For the last couple of years this blog has been filled with sunset shots from the summit of Mauna Kea. Well, I can't do that now, so as some of you may have noticed I've been trying one or two other things. Practise makes perfect as they say and think I'd figured out how to deal with that superb Mauna Kea light when the sun was setting, but now I'm in a new environment and have yet to get to grip with things.

Still, I think I may have found my sunrise spot if I ever feel like waking up at 4am (it happens every so often, sometimes not by choice!). There's actually a great place almost within walking distance from home but you've seen that photo and I want to find something else. About 40 minutes away by car is my favourite spot on the island, the Puna coast between Kalapana and Kapoho. I often go there just to relax and get away from the stress of work and everyday living. It is an extraordinarily beautiful and peaceful place but have yet to visit at sunrise when I'm sure it's even more stunning.

Anyway, just a quick navigational sortie today - remember this is on the east side of the island so not that great for sunsets. It's not a bad place for whale watching either, but I think they saw me with my camera, so that was the end of that.

Things you miss in the viewfinder

2011-02-19T22:47:00.007-10:00

A friend of mine on the Big Island noticed I'd missed something in a recent picture I took. I have no idea how I didn't see this. He saw something similar in another picture of mine and it seems I had inadvertently intruded on her privacy so it's not really appropriate for publication here. Thanks, Greg.

Morning has broken

2011-02-17T19:30:00.003-10:00

Actually, it's dark right now and it's the evening, but I love the magical crepuscular rays in this sunrise shot from last week. Taken from the Puna cliffs near my home.

Laupahoehoe rocks

2011-02-16T20:51:00.003-10:00

A couple more black and white shots from Laupahoehoe Point on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island. This is one of the most beautiful spots on the Big Island that often gets overlooked by visitors but also has a tragic past. On this evening, as I mentioned before, the thick vog and clouds made everything look so dull there were no colours to portray and even if I tried (and I did!) it looked wrong. So resorted to catching the movement of the water instead. Apologies if you don't like black and white but sometimes it works better. I prefer colour myself!

Stormy seas

2011-02-14T21:31:00.003-10:00

Laupahoehoe Point last week. The surf was up as was the vog and cloud which made everything really dull and not very photogenic - you would have had a hard time telling the difference between a colour and black and white shot. So I took a liberty; B&W and tonemapped one single raw file. There are one or two things that I need to fix but it looks quite nice to me.

UKIRT: before and after

2011-02-12T23:23:00.004-10:00

These are a couple more spectacular photos by Paul Hirst taken from inside the UKIRT dome. As I mentioned in my previous post Paul used to work with me at UKIRT but has since moved to a position at Gemini although since their northern hemisphere office is literally a few yards from ours, I still see him quite often!

This is "before" although that's not entirely accurate (WFCAM had arrived when this shot was taken), but shows the telescope in "Cassegrain Mode". If you click on the picture you'll see a lot more detail. The scientific instruments, plus the guider and wavefront sensor are hidden out of sight, below the primary mirror, at the cassegrain focus. (Blogger's spell checker is suggesting I change cassegrain to casserole by the way - don't think I will).

Today the situation is very different for reasons I just don't have the energy to write about now, but have written about them in the past. Now we do wide-field near-infrared imaging using WFCAM, and have to admit we do it rather well. And now we do it with no-one at the summit. It means no more Mauna Kea sunset shots from me, but does save a lot of money. The telescope looks very different as well:

WFCAM is actually positioned on top of the primary mirror. This is an extremely unusual arrangement for a major telescope but in order to do wide-field imaging the instrument needed to be put at the prime focus, so this is where it ended up and is still there tonight. As I write this it's observing our Galactic plane and taking data astronomers will use for decades to come and will likely launch many careers.

Well, there you go, anything to disguise the fact that I took the most boring and uninteresting photos on Laupahoehoe Point today and just can't find a way to post any picture I took and make it look good. So thought you might like Paul's instead!

PS. Looking from the outside, UKIRT looks so much more serene - you wouldn't know what's going on in the inside!

UKIRT: good news on its way I hope

2011-02-11T23:04:00.004-10:00

Photo by Paul Hirst, published with permission.

The last few years have been quite traumatic both personally and professionally. I hope to publish some relatively good news in the next few weeks on the professional side of things. What I can say right now is that it looks as though the number of publications resulting from UKIRT data in 2010 has smashed the previous record. If this turns out to be correct it will be a stunning result for the telescope I've spent most of career at. UKIRT has been threatened with closure all its life but the threat became very real in the last couple of years. Despite this, it now looks as though the telescope is more scientifically productive than it has ever been.

More later.

The photo above was taken by my good friend and colleague Paul Hirst. Paul worked with me at UKIRT for many years and then left for a position at the Gemini North Telescope (but he still takes time off to comment on this blog every so often). He takes wonderful photos and there are a couple more I'll post from him of UKIRT which are even better than this one. But only if he buys lunch next time!

More rocks

2011-02-10T20:46:00.002-10:00

I'm running out of photos since I haven't taken any the last few days, but it has given me a chance to play around with Lightroom for an hour each evening learning some of its features. I have to say it's one superb piece of software although I haven't got my head around many of the image processing tools yet and often find myself being confused by what I just did!

Anyway, another photo from the other day at Keaukaha Beach Park in Hilo. This picture was underexposed because it was becoming quite dark and to expose properly would have meant the water movement would have been smoothed so much the feeling of water rushing towards me would have been lost. Completely blurring out water movement often works really well (see some of my photos from the last few days) but it can also result in a loss of a sense of movement in a picture. At least that's what I think! And what do I know? I'm still an utter amateur at this game.

The problem with underexposing is that the dark lava rocks here really do look black in a picture so tried to bring back the actual brightness and colour I saw with my eye using Lightroom. Of course, dealing with the noise of under-exposed blackness brings other problems! This is defintely a photo where a graduated ND filter would have helped and HDR techniques would have messed everything up.

Still, I really do like the water in this one.

Withdrawal symptoms

2011-02-09T22:54:00.005-10:00

It's been two months since I was last at the summit of Mauna Kea. I knew this was going to happen with the change to remote operations, but I can't tell you how much I miss the place. Well, at least my few readers won't be subjected to picture after picture of sunsets from the mountain, so thought I'd start boring people with Puna sunrises instead.

Only joking, but I need to find a new outlet. The thing is, I don't think I can take a better picture of Puna than the one in "Cliff watching", but here are two or three more from that morning (but nowhere near as good, aesthetically or technically). I'm not a morning person so please bear with me. This is a very beautiful place but sometimes only comes out at sunrise when the light is just right.

Same location as the cliff watching photo, just in a slightly different spot and well before sunrise, so it's a very long exposure (15 secs). There's enough light to illuminate the cliffs though and smooth the water. That lava rock really is dark but seems to become a little lighter at dawn.

This one's an HDR shot and not my best effort, but looks OK. Having the sun rise in the same picture as black lava means you're going to get one of them wrong, so bracketed three shots and tried to make it look the same as my eye was seeing. It's not quite right but not terrible. This is a typical scene around here - the edge of an old pahoehoe lava flow and vegetation growing where it didn't quite reach. Of course the vegetation is growing on an older lava flow...

A sunrise and a young tree growing from an old lava flow. There's even some dew on the branches, or perhaps it's sea spray. Not sure. I think it's a young ironwood which is very common on the shores here, I even have a couple in my yard. But I'm in unfamiliar territory, there's no observatory in sight. I don't know one tree from another and there's no snow and ice! Disorientation looms...

It'll never work...

2011-02-08T23:44:00.004-10:00

I've tried to get a panorama of the sunrise on the cliffs near here for the last two years. It's never worked - too much water for the stitching software to do its job, and when I finally get the software to work, I hate the picture.

Oh well, never mind, I've other things to worry about!

Sad news: Walter Steiger of UH Hilo

2011-02-07T19:52:00.003-10:00

On Sunday 6th Feb, Professor Walter Steiger, astronomer, was killed in a traffic accident in Hilo. I didn't know Walt very well, I only met him a couple of times, but it's clear that he was a well-loved person in both the astronomy and local communities and his passing has shocked and saddened everyone.

Walt was a pioneer in astronomy and was extremely influential in bringing modern astronomy to Hawaii and making it one of the most important places in the world for observational astronomy. Many of us working here now probably owe our current careers to Walt so this is especially sad news to our community. I'm sure all those connected with astronomy in Hawaii, those that were taught by him and those that simply met him will be thinking of Walt, his family and friends.

Cliff watching

2011-02-06T23:37:00.003-10:00

I wish I could have called this post "Whale watching", but it'd be a very boring post. As ever, although I know humpback whales are out there because I hear them every evening, they won't appear when I'm out watching for them. Oh, sure, there's the joker who knew I'd just arrived on the cliffs and waited for me to get out of the car. Just in front of me, a hundred yards off the cliffs, the bugger breached big style because he knew I didn't have my camera ready. Once I'd got myself set up, and admittedly that takes a little longer than it used to (my old camera had few buttons and didn't need a lense to be attached to it) he'd dived and was long gone.

I say male because I think he was alone and that tends to be the way here - females have calves so if you see two whales or spouts close by it's almost certainly a mother and calf. Off in the distance I could see several pairs of spouts from mothers and their children but they were too far away. I took a few photos anyway but they would compete for the most boring photographs ever of distant smudges.

At dawn this morning I was awake and thought I'd surprise the whales since they know I tend to look for them in the evening, but they'd all buggered off. So I took a picture of the cliffs instead. This is a few hundred yards south from where I live. It's a great spot for whale watching unless you bring a camera.

Maelstrom

2011-02-05T21:57:00.003-10:00

I thought about calling this post "A quick exit" because that's what happened. Literally a second after taking this picture the wave was over the rock I was standing on and I grabbed the camera and tripod and made my way off this rather exposed spot via my exit route. Actually, it wasn't quite as dramatic as it sounds, the ocean was pretty calm until this set of waves came in and even they were pretty small, but enough to make me very wet and probably destroy my new toy if I'd just stayed there. In fact I thought I had ruined the shot by grabbing the camera before the exposure ended (it was a 1-sec exposure, f/22 for the geeks) but as I found out later, I'd timed it perfectly. Both pictures here are the same by the way, I just converted one to black and white because I like the way it looks. Despite it being a typical Hilo evening - calm waters and and a few showers, the black and white photo makes it look more stormy, whereas the other catches the colours of the rocks, ocean and sky.

Over on the left someone was watching me during the whole hour I spent here. I'm not sure why, maybe they were just waiting for this moment. I've been here too long, however, and know never to turn your back on the ocean. Even calm waters can surprise you every now and then!

I actually came to this place (Keaukaha Beach Park, Hilo) hoping for some rainbow pictures because as you can see there were showers around and thought I might be lucky. Well, I did catch a couple but unfortunately they weren't particularly impressive. So ended up catching and dodging the waves instead.

More pictures to come I hope...

Front yard astronomy

2011-02-04T22:26:00.003-10:00

There are no street lights where I live and the atmosphere is generally unpolluted. With no big cities nearby the sky is often incredibly dark and your eyes don't even have to be dark-adapted to see a glorious view of the night sky. Tonight wasn't the best, there is a little vog in the sky from Kilauea due to the southerly winds but most of that is west of here.

So out came the camera because although I tried this kind of photo before with my old point-and-shoot, with very disappointing results I might add, I wanted to see what this camera and lense could do. OK, so I whacked up the ISO to its maximum resulting in a lot of noise, but at least you can see the night sky from my front porch.

Orion is just below and right of centre, the belt, sword and the famous M42 nebula are easily visible. Just above the centre is Betelgeuse which seems to be making the news recently as it may well go supernova in the near future, well, anytime from tomorrow to the next few million years. At the bottom left is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Top right is Aldebaran, trying to hide behind my Norfolk pine is Rigel and just to the left and above Orion is a hint of the Galactic plane.

Between Sirius and Orion is the Red Rectangle, an object I spend much of my limited research time on, but I'm afraid it's far too faint and small to be obvious in this photo!

Jeez, I think I've just exhausted everything I know about real astronomy!

The royal wedding

2011-02-04T01:08:00.002-10:00

Yes, I'm British. Am I excited about the upcoming royal wedding between William and Kate? Well, I'll leave that up to you to decide, but Clarke and Dawe might give you a clue.

I know I'm late with the news, just like her majesty's government in paying some money they owe me.

Reflections in lava

2011-02-03T22:45:00.003-10:00

If there's one thing that drives photographers nuts in Hawaii, it's trying to take photos that include black lava rock. It is light-suckingly impossible to expose for the blackness of the rock and also include the ocean and sky. One way to do it is to use graduated ND filters but sometimes even they aren't good enough plus I don't have any (although I think I'm going to have to invest in a set soon). HDR photography is the only other way I know to deal with the problem but that comes with its own problems, especially when the picture involve water or clouds. You can get a picture that looks OK but end up with some peculiar effects in the details, just like the picture above.

Oh well, it's OK, just don't look too closely! It was taken close to the hot ponds on Puna's Red Road. I'd have got closer to get the full reflection in the rock pool but have you ever tried to walk across this stuff in low light with only slippahs (flip flops) on your feet? And carrying an expensive camera only two weeks old? Well, I tried and gave up very quickly!

Hilo rocks again

2011-01-30T23:16:00.003-10:00

A couple more from yesterday evening and another Lightroom workout. Thought I'd try black and white but can't compete with Ant!

The next few weeks are going to be interesting as the STFC sort out their stuff. I'm optimistic one moment and pessimistic the next. Right now I'm in the middle of the two but it changes day to day.

Hilo rocks

2011-01-30T00:07:00.005-10:00

I've been a little quiet recently, sorry about that. To be honest I thought I'd go quiet a lot earlier than I did as UKIRT has long since gone into Minimalist Mode and expected to be called several time every night. In fact that has happened but not as often as I thought plus the weather has been so bad on Mauna Kea's summit we've been closed a lot and the few times we've been able to open and observe means that any little gotcha will, well, be a gotcha. Thankfully we've not had too many.

The last few nights have been wonderful - clear skies, hardly any faults, few calls and lots of great science data. Long may this continue!

So on my night off, on the way back from the grocery store, I thought I'd try the new camera out and also give lightroom a go, the idea being going from taking a picture and then processing it through software and coming up with a picture I like. It's taken all evening but then again I'm used to staying up late, so not a problem!

Anyway, I'm sure this picture could be improved, but not bad for my first go I think! It was taken just east of Hilo in the first park I could find right by the ocean- my groceries were in the back and didn't want to take long.

Let sleeping cats lie

2011-01-24T22:42:00.003-10:00

She looked so sweet before I woke her up...

Wolf Moon

2011-01-20T18:55:00.004-10:00

January's full moon is often called the "Wolf Moon" which apparently originates from wolves howling at the full moon around North American Indian villages in the middle of the winter. This picture was taken last night as the full moon was rising over Kaloli Point, Hawaii, while I was still trying to learn the new camera. I have to say, it blows my old camera out of the water...

That's how the light gets in

2011-01-19T22:43:00.003-10:00

Tonight I've been working on several things I've fallen behind on and something changed. I couldn't put my finger on it first of all and then it struck me. The coqui frogs had gone silent. Normally I put up with a 90-decibel chorus each night and have learned to live with it and so it seemed strange when everything became silent. Well, not really silent, because I could hear the waves crashing against the cliffs again and more. These are the sounds that made this such a wonderful place to move to over a decade ago.

A few hundred yards away are humpback whales. I know they're there even if I can't see them. The wailing and unmistakable spouting and fin-splashing are now the loudest noises of the evening. To hear them once again made me feel quite emotional!

Just a couple of weeks ago I was in Carpinteria with Pam and listened to something else that made me emotional. I don't know quite what triggered it but think both of us had been through the most traumatic year possible. Cancer, possible redundancy, having to relocate, promotion, successful completion of a huge project, dodgy knees and back, money, lupus, pneumonia, and, well all sorts of things that I'd normally expect to deal with over several years, not twelve months.

So I played this song in Carpinteria for Pam and simply started crying. I think I lasted quite a way through it but probably lost it at around the 6-minute mark, because although everything before that bit is stunningly beautiful, everything after just got me. I don't know how else to describe it other than a song about optimism. Pam and I are still around, aren't we?!

I promise this is the last Cohen video I'll post, not least because it'll make me emotional again! Still, please enjoy the music and the musicians. And I apologise to Pam for the totally unexpected and out of character loss of a stiff upper lip!

Cats and hats

2011-01-18T22:17:00.003-10:00

And the moon.
First shots from the new camera taken this evening. Nothing spectacular I'm afraid, I think that'll take some time, this is going to be like learning to take photos all over again since the new camera is so different to what I'm used to. I'm sure it'll be a fun process although I was already swearing at the camera while trying to photograph the moon! Everything I'm used to has changed. I'd become quite slick with the old camera but now it takes me five minutes just to figure out how to change the exposure time.

Cat pictures will come one day soon I'm sure - at least this one doesn't move around all the time or play with the neck strap.

And a picture of my hat.

Reflections

2011-01-17T23:06:00.002-10:00

Too tired to post anything substantial, so hope you enjoy these pictures instead. Both From California. The top one is Summerland and the bottom is Carpinteria.

Despite posting no news or astronomy lately, things are going on behind the scenes and I hope to post some encouraging news and science shortly, but it may be a few weeks from now. In the meantime remote operations is keeping me busy - it's a few phone calls each night which isn't too different from summit operations but what the hell, I didn't expect anything different!

The new camera arrives tomorrow. I almost feel naked without any means of taking pictures. One of my neighbours left me a bunch of bananas on my porch and it would have made a great still life photo and a piece about how wonderful my neighbours are, but I can't do that until tomorrow. In any case, if my neighbour reads this blog (very unlikely!), thank you so much!

Water sprites

2011-01-15T22:37:00.003-10:00

I don't know what the name is for this phenomenon as it seems "water sprites" is a description given to fairies living in water. Some might be a little surprised I don't believe in fairies, but I thought I should mention that fact so we're all on the same page. Still, I've not seen these before. If you click on the picture to get a larger version and look closely, especially from the centre of the picture to the top right quadrant, you see a lot of weird things jumping out of the water.

I took several pictures of this spot as I was really just experimenting with settings, and they are in none of the other pictures. They really look quite bizarre. I'm sure they're simply caused by small water droplets but they do appear to be launched into the air by nothing at all.

The picture was taken in Goleta, near Santa Barbara, CA. I've no idea what the name of the creek is, but it's at the end of some road that Pam knows. Just in case anyone wants to go and look for themselves.

That's life

2011-01-14T22:56:00.004-10:00

While waiting for the new camera I practised a little with lightroom tonight and think I'm starting to understand it a little more, but you know as you get older learning new stuff always becomes harder. This is a picture I posted a few days ago but redid it in lightroom and think it's a little improved (it's from Carpinteria Beach, CA). The graduated density tool is screwing with my head though...

But the subject is nothing to do with the picture, it's to do with those things that always seem to happen to you - anyone familiar with the BBC comedy series "One Foot in the Grave"? It's about a very grumpy old man called Victor Meldrew and how everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Like Victor, I should have predicted it, but after splashing out on the new camera yesterday my car broke down today in a very expensive way. You can't plan for these things in any sensible way of course, it's just life.

Someone said at work today when I mentioned the breakdown "at least you can enjoy your new camera to cheer you up". The camera doesn't get here 'til tuesday.

Have a great and inexpensive weekend, everyone!

It was always going to happen one day...

2011-01-13T21:59:00.004-10:00

I've been saving money for various reasons over the last two or three years but bit the bullet today and ordered a proper camera plus one or two accessories. Hopefully an EOS Canon 60D will be on its way over the Pacific shortly (I hope it doesn't experience the same turbulence that was present the other day). My friend Ant is selling me a second-hand Sigma lense which saves a little money and then I decided to go all the way and buy Adobe's Lightroom software. I might as well get this all out of the way in one go. It makes repairing the damage to my bank account a little easier to figure out if it's all done at the same time.

Lightroom is going to require a bit of learning but I did get my first picture processed by it this evening from my old and broken camera (which is in pieces beside me as I write this - I haven't been able to fix it unfortunately). It was a horribly over-exposed picture of an oil platform, ocean, surf and sky from Carpinteria Beach and the picture still isn't that great, but at least I figured my way through some of the menus!

Here it is:

If you think it isn't very good you should see it before it went through Lightroom. It was a nice test piece and since I've been used to using Picasa for a couple of years now this will require some re-training. For instance, I've still to find Lightroom's "I'm feeling lucky" button...

Bugger that - another one bites the dust

2011-01-12T22:17:00.004-10:00

My camera didn't survive the latest trip. It worked in California but didn't make it through the last 15,000 miles or so. Not sure what broke it - perhaps the wet and cold California beaches did for it or maybe the rather bumpy flight back across the Pacific, but it's broken and a write-off. It'd cost more than it's worth to get fixed. That's two cameras broken in two years although the previous one got hit by lightning, so I'll forgive it for expiring on me!

Perhaps it's time to invest in a proper camera. I'll be thinking about this over the next day or two especially as my Mauna Kea summit visits will be limited, but then again even if my current camera still worked, I've outgrown the thing. It can't do what I want it to do.

Even more disappointing is that it was pretty obvious the camera was on its way out in California - the zoom kept failing and focusing was becoming a real bitch hence a lot of not-quite-in-focus pictures - but I didn't spot the problem until downloading all the photos onto my PC and spotting the focus problem. Oh well, the trip to California and London was wonderful anyway!

So, here are a couple of the last shots the camera ever took, both at Summerland, CA. Hope you enjoy them!

Odd one out

2011-01-11T23:47:00.002-10:00

Summerland, CA.

Santa Barbara mountains

2011-01-08T13:00:00.004-10:00

Not sure if this is the correct term for the mountains, but Pam was kind enough to take me up on a mountain road just north of Santa Barbara and the views were simply gobsmacking. I believe this is a view of Los Padres National Park and tried to give black and white a go.

I'm no Ansel Adams and can't even compete with Ant's black & white photos, but these don't look too bad. Snow in California was something I've wanted to see for years, just like a Mauna Kea visitor hoping to see snow in Hawaii on Mauna Kea.

Central London has been my location for the last few days but with all the rain and a fairly busy schedule I haven't been able to take any photos but I think most of you have seen pictures of the place. I took a taxi ride from the hotel to Waterloo station this morning and felt like a tourist - it's been 20 years since I was last here and driving via St Jame's Park and by the houses of Parliament was quite special!

Back to dealing with Minimalist Mode next week! And for those that want a little colour, Summerland last week:

Summerland, CA

2011-01-03T21:59:00.002-10:00

Well, it would be if it wasn't so damn cold!

Stoned

2011-01-02T21:50:00.003-10:00

No, not me, silly! There's just not a lot of picture taking opportunities right now what with all the rain in California so thought a picture of some water felt right. Plus, I think it looks quite nice.

Hope everyone had a great New Year!

Died and gone to heaven

2010-12-31T14:43:00.002-10:00

What more can a Brit ask for? We find ourselves in a hotel just off State Street in Santa Barbara, CA, and within 100 yards are several pubs including a micro-brewery and several excellent places to eat including an Indian restaurant (and it's very good as well!). Oh, I guess the "authentic" British fish and chip shop should be included as well although this is the only "authentic" chippie I've ever seen that sells clam chowder and I didn't see mushy peas on the menu. But I'm told it's very good!

Lunch here was rather splendid as well!

The evening started with a quick sunset visit to Carpinteria Beach to see the oil rigs but they didn't spoil the view fortunately. What a beautiful way to see off 2010 and welcome 2011.

Happy New Year everyone!

Out for a while...

2010-12-27T18:48:00.002-10:00

So I'm returning to one of my favourite places on the planet:

Followed by a trip to a place that does this sort of thing:

For anyone interested, today we released a short news article (with one or two pictures by yours truly) called Remote Operations Implemented for UKIRT. It's available via the UKIRT website. For anyone who wants a little more reading, we also recently published what might be our last ever newsletter, again available from the website or you can use the direct link - UKIRT Newsletter Autumn 2010 (careful, it's quite a large PDF file, around 17MB). There's plenty of history in it. And science of course.

Whether the weather...

2010-12-26T20:49:00.003-10:00

...be fine
Or whether the weather be not
Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather
Whether we like it or not.

And we like it not 'cos we're closed. Again. Remote observing at UKIRT is not going quite as planned. Not because anything technical is causing a problem, it's just been the summit weather has been dreadful for over a week now and we haven't been able to open the dome since the first few nights after the switchover from summit-based observing to remote operations from sea level. And there's more bad weather on the way. Sigh...

UKIRT's closed dome at sunset.

It's after sunset but still we're still closed, the humidity is too high to open.

Keck 2 isn't open either, but I'm cheating because this and the other pictures were taken a few days ago. Remote observing means no-one at the summit!

I wish you all a very me...er...have a nice day!

2010-12-24T22:26:00.002-10:00

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practised with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practise religious or secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.
By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms:

This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Disclaimer: No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced.

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Having said all that, which I blatantly nicked from elsewhere, I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Tom