A high dynamic range UKIRT

It's coming to the end of a long night and I'm tired. This wasn't helped by someone banging on my dormitory door at 8:30 yesterday morning - they were looking for someone else. I never really got back to sleep after that.

The sunset this evening was beautiful, hopefully I'll have some pictures to show later although you'll have hopefully seen the anticrepuscular ray picture taken earlier. That was taken using multiple pictures using different exposure times and then processed with HDR software. I took several shots of UKIRT as well and processed them slightly differently, the idea was to get more of an artistic picture than a realistic one (using details enhancer in Photomatix Pro). For the first attempt I think it worked fairly well although really I'm just trying to get a feel for the technique.

Anticrepuscular rays

Taken shortly before this evening's sunset at the summit of Mauna Kea. Little snow remains now, but we still get some spectacular views. This is a picture of the shadow of Mauna Kea and above it anticrepuscular rays. These are the same things as those sun rays you see through clouds on occasion but on the opposite part of the sky (they converge at the anti-solar point, 180 degrees from the sun itself). The rays are actually parallel, but they're projected onto the sky and follow great circles, so appear to converge.

PS. Happy Birthday Mum!

Don't open the trap door

I don't think many of my American readers were ever given the opportunity to see "The Trap Door" and perhaps it's the sort of kid's show that would never be given air time in the US, but it was great! Admittedly I wasn't really a kid when it first aired in 1984 but I loved it the first time I saw it. Although I've had a bit of a go about the UK in a few posts, one thing the country has always been good at is creating good TV, although even that is disappearing down the plughole these days.



The first episode was called "Breakfast Time". It introduced us to the stars of the show: Berk (a blue monster), Boni (an undead skull) and Drutt (no idea, a "thing"). Berk was the servant of a huge monster that lived upstairs that we never got to see although during the series we learned that he liked the occasional slime bath, enjoyed grotesque food and had giant eyes that were occasionally removed for cleaning.



Berk and his friends lived in an old castle's cellar which had a trap door. If opened it led to a dark and wacky netherworld infested with spooky monsters and the occasional ghoul. Of course the door was opened in each episode, either by Berk or the monsters below.



Only two series were ever made (40 very short episodes I believe) but it seems a DVD is available via Amazon UK, so guess what I'll be buying shortly?

I'm back on the mountain for a couple of nights. The forecast is good so for a change might actually observe for full nights. If the clouds come in though I might be watching some more episodes on YouTube!

A log, a photo opportunity

OK, so I stole the title from Ant who posted these gorgeous pictures of a log washed up in Hilo Bay. I can't compete with that, but I do have a picture of a log. It's up at 14,000-feet on the summit of Mauna Kea, and I'm wondering what on earth it's doing up there. Anyone know? It's next to the lunch hut where those unfortunate observatory day crews who haven't brought up their own food find themselves at midday. Fried fish and rice, cooked thousands of feet below the summit and brought up by a brave HP cook. Yum! Then again, the the orange chicken they cooked for us the other day was actually very good.

Generally the views from the summit area are fantastic but this is a spot I wouldn't recommend visiting. Hopefully it'll be cleaned up in the near-future.

Anger management

I don't know what was going on today on our little part of the island but so far reports suggest road work made a lot of people really angry. There's only one road between Puna and Hilo and this afternoon everyone was stuck on it. Usually it's an accident that cuts off a huge part of the island but for those of us stuck in the traffic jam, well, we didn't care what caused it. It's a civil engineering problem that has been caused by, uhm, civil engineers.

So what welcome do I get when I finally managed to get home? A pissed off cat. Then again, once they'd been fed they were doing all they could to look cute again. They're not really into remembering a grudge.

Spring cleaning

The pre-dawn start this morning wasn't a welcome one. A call from the telescope in the very early hours woke me up and as usual I had trouble getting back to sleep and I find three or four hours sleep insufficient for a day at the summit, but that's the job...

Although I was on the mountain for another reason, today was cleaning day. Major observatories need to keep their telescope optics clean, in our case, being an infrared telescope, to reduce the emission from dust particles on the telescope mirror and the instrument's optics that are exposed to the atmosphere. The way that's done normally is to do what's known as a CO_{2 clean (}CO₂ being, of course, carbon dioxide). We can't just hose down the optics with soap and water, there a millions of dollars worth of instruments and associated electronics all over the place, so CO₂ is used instead as it sublimates almost instantly after it's released in a small jet.

Here one of our technicians is cleaning the instrument's field lense. It's quite a tricky job, he has to work on a crane and access is very difficult, but it's a vital job. The lense is close to the top of the dome, so is exposed to the elements when we observe. In wet and windy conditions dust sticks to the glass and we see that as out-of-focus doughnuts in our images. These imperfections can be dealt with in processing after the event, but as usual, it's best to avoid the problem in the first place.


This is the secondary mirror. It's in beautiful condition so no need to clean it today. That's good news as getting access to it is awkward!

The plumbing in this place is incredible. We have nitrogen, helium and glycol lines all over the place which are mainly used to keep our instruments cold and also to cool the primary mirror. They're fed by chillers and compressors in a dark and noisy room down below. All the lines have to be able to cope with a telescope that slews all over the sky without leaking, and it's a surprisingly difficult job. I think all telescopes around the world have had to deal with a leak from time to time. Add into this all the electrical cabling that's required and the need to avoid interference with the instruments' sensitive detectors (generally called "pickup") you can see that we need to employ excellent engineers and technicians in order to function. I think we've done well in this respect.

While the cleaning was going on I wasn't able to do the tests I was up for, so rather than just annoy everyone by taking photographs all day I thought I'd help with everyone's safety and stand close to the emergency "off" button just in case. I think I understood the instructions but I don't think my efforts were appreciated...

Finally, all spick and span. A beautifully clean primary mirror. Just in time as well, as we really do seem to be moving away from the recent terrible winter conditions and the real Mauna Kea astronomical weather is back with us.

Nostalgia

I don't know what's been going on with my mind the last few days, but for some reason I keep thinking back to happy days growing up and living in England. The country has become a cesspit in recent years with an increasingly "Big Brother" government so why on earth have I had these feelings? Have you read George Orwell's book "Nineteen Eighty-Four"? The latest attempt by the government to introduce a widely-hated national ID card scheme now has them forcing it on a group of unwilling professionals "voluntarily".

The voluntary bit is that the pilots don't have to partake in the scheme. If they don't, however, they can't work as they'll need the ID to get access to their aircraft. That's ignoring the current situation where pilots have to go through the same security as us passengers and can't take a tube of toothpaste larger than 100-ml with them onto the aircraft because it might explode. Let's forget the fact that once on the flight deck the pilots will be be able to crash the aircraft into their building of choice whether they have that toothpaste or not - or turn their "office" into a bloody murder scene with a quick swing of the crash axe.

Sorry, I'm going off the point. I miss England although I don't want to live there ever again. Despite my opinion though, I still have happy memories of the place. I lived in Preston, Lancashire, for seven years of my life after growing up near London and made many good friends there and still miss the friendly locals and some great pubs!

Today I came across this youtube video. It's not the greatest movie in the world but memories of Preston town centre came flooding back. The song's quite nice as well.



I don't think I saw one CCTV in that video. It must have been taken a long time ago...

Overdone or not?

In my last post there's a picture of the clouds at sunset over Mauna Loa. I have another picture, same photos but processed on my old PC, which I think is far more dramatic and is shown above. The problem is that I like this picture, the colours are much more dramatic, but they don't reflect reality. The picture in my previous post looks much more like it did to my eye at the time. There's also a problem with saturation (some of the brighter regions are clearly blown out too much) yet I still like it.

What do you reckon? A picture that reflects what you actually see or one that changes the colours and intensity to make it look more dramatic? I'm not sure I can decide.

Slowly recovering

So many unexpectedly expensive things happened during the last week from hell that I haven't had a chance to do very much recently other than order a new cheque book. Fortunately the weather at the summit of Mauna Kea has improved dramatically in the last few days so things are going relatively smoothly up there - it makes you wonder if there really is someone in charge of everything that actually has a sense of humour - let's give those astronomers months of despicable weather and then when it clears I'll make everything they own back home stop working. Ha!

I think I've managed to transfer all the important stuff from my now deceased PC to the new one although I'm still having several issues with Vista - I think they're mostly personality clashes though. I'm sick and tired of it questioning my motives every time I try and do something but one day I'll figure out how to stop it doing this. I have solution to this PCness though, a sledgehammer within easy reach.

One nice thing about the new but cheap PC is that I can run some of the photo-editing software I have and see the results in a couple of minutes rather than the couple of days my old thing used to take - and without having to keep a fire extinguisher nearby in case it exploded which it often threatened to do.

The other problem though, is that I've had to spend a lot of time at home recently putting out various fires (metaphorically speaking of course) so haven't had the chance to take many new photos. This evening's sunset was nice (see below) but just can't compete with what you see at the summit (see above). Oh well, I'll be back up there soon enough...

What will the new day bring?

A neighbour joins me watching Kaloli point at sunrise wondering what the new day will bring.

The last week has been one of those that I'd like to start all over again if it were at all possible. Last Saturday my computer died. Overnight on Sunday/Monday my water pump died so no water. On Wednesday my car's air conditioner broke in a manner that deserves a separate post, but right now the mechanics don't believe a word I've told them. Today my water heater kicked the bucket and I've spent most of the day underneath the house trying to get hot water again.

I hope the coming week will be better. If there was a lottery here I'd be signing up right now, because I don't think I've ever spent so much dosh in one week...