Lost and found: a summit

A snapshot taken on the way down from Mauna Kea's summit at sunrise. The Island of Hawai'i appears to be missing part of a mountain as it was seen floating off to the west. Mauna Kea's shadow confirms that the mystery summit was drifting westwards. Searchers are looking for the rest of the mountain.

Our planet's shadow

Not the best picture I've ever taken (in fact it's 3 or 4 photos pasted together to make a panorama) but at dawn at 14,000 feet after working all night (and sans tripod) I have a good excuse! What I liked about this view was the Earth's shadow was so obvious in the sky behind Mauna Loa.

I've always had a fascination with natural phenomena, anything from the oceans, mountains, volcanoes and earthquakes to the weather, our atmosphere and the cosmos. If you're ever unlucky enough to sit next to me on an aeroplane I can tell you two things: 1) you'll be in the aisle seat and 2) I'll spend the flight looking out of the window!

The Earth's shadow isn't so obvious at sea level but if you're looking out of an airliner's window at sunset or sunrise, or you're on a mountain, you'll have seen that dark band in the sky. It's our planet's shadow.

It was the BBC who stole my spot

In my last post I moaned, jokingly of course, about a TV film crew hogging my favourite sunset photography spot on Mauna Kea, but didn't know who these people were other than they spoke with British accents and the topic appeared to be about Mars. I speculated that the crew may have been filming for the famous BBC show "The Sky at Night" which I grew up watching and is still going more than 52 years after the first show. The Sky at Night team have been out here on Mauna Kea before so I wouldn't have been surprised to learn they were visiting again, but usually we know about it in advance.

Thanks to Chris North's comment on the post though, a researcher for The Sky at Night, I learned this was not a Sky at Night crew but he suggested it might be a BBC crew working with Prof. Brian Cox, a particle physicist and musician who often presents science programmes for the BBC. After a little research and finding Brian's twitter page, I'm 99% certain this was Brian working on a BBC documentary called "Seven Wonders of the Solar System". I am very grateful to Chris for his tip as it led me in the right direction!

From Brian's tweets (twits?) I learned that he was filming a segment on Olympus Mons, a massive volcano on Mars. For those not familiar with the subject, Olympus Mons is the largest known volcano in our Solar System. It dwarfs Mauna Loa which I briefly described in "Sunset views of Mauna Loa", its height above Mars' surface is an incredible 16 miles or three times the height of Everest and is nearly 400 miles wide. Considering Mars is a much smaller planet than the Earth the size of Olympus Mons is simply staggering. The reason Brian was visiting Mauna Kea (and both Kilauea and Mauna Loa) was, I suspect, because Olympus Mons is a shield volcano and therefore the same type as the Hawaiian volcanoes.

Coincidentally, Olympus Mons played a small part in my career a few years ago. I was commissioning a new mid-infrared instrument called Michelle and the team and I thought it might be a nice idea to see if we could image Olympus Mons although we were rather pessimistic about the chances of success. Mid-infrared observing from the ground is really difficult, even on Mauna Kea, but we thought it would be a bit of fun and a break from the more rigorous commissioning schedule. In addition, we were still working with an engineering array rather than a decent scientific-grade array, so we really didn't expect to see much more than the disk of Mars and even then it would be horribly distorted. It turned out we were wrong.

Mars at 7.9-microns. The dark patch at the bottom is the south pole, the blob just to the right of centre and near the top is Olympus Mons. 7.9-microns is a tough spot to observe through our atmosphere, so we were quite surprised to get this image! The stripes are due to the readout of the poor-quality engineering-grade mid-infrared array.

At 11.6-microns the volcano really stood out. I was astonished when I saw this image for the first time. It might not look good to most people, but we really didn't expect to see any features at all yet this thing clearly exhibited a shadow and must be a large mountain. (Three quarters of the way up, just right of centre).

This might look like a terrible image, but it's was taken at 20-microns which is just about the toughest wavelength to observe from the ground, you really need to use some special techniques and have really clear and dry conditions. To say I was somewhat pleased when I saw this pop up on our displays would be a bit of an understatement!

Someone stole my spot

This evening I popped outside for the sunset as usual and found a TV crew had stolen my favourite sunset watching/photography spot. Just who do they think they are I ask you! How thoughtless!

Seriously, I have no idea who they were although the accents were British, so could possibly have been the BBC out filming a science documentary or similar - The Sky at Night? The person talking to the camera didn't look like Chris Lintott, one of the presenters of that show, but I might be wrong. From what little I overhead I think they were filming something about Mars.

In any case, I'm going to have to make myself a little sign and stick it in the ground there - Tom's Photo Spot, Stay Away!

Sunrise descent

We left the telescope just as the sun was rising above the inversion layer thousands of feet below us. On the drive down the shadow of Mauna Kea was very obvious in the west, but just as we reached the turn off for Submillimeter Valley, the view was so nice we had to stop and take a few photos of Hualalai and the shadow. I don't have too many sunrise shots from the mountain, I'm usually so tired the last thing I want to do is stand outside with a camera when there's a hot breakfast and bed waiting a few thousand feet below, but it was worth pulling over!

Gemini laser show

Gemini put on one of their laser shows tonight, just the thing to get me out in the cold night air at 4am to freshen up a little. It's been a strange night, some excellent data and then some real rubbish when the atmosphere suddenly became very turbulent, but then improved. It allowed me to send some long sequences to our observing queue and take a short break outside with the camera.

Update 8th Aug 2009: I replaced the image with a new one, think I over-processed the original at 4am in the morning at 14K feet! The laser is a little more obvious now.

Watching the sunset

There were a gazillion sightseers up here this evening to watch the sunset although fortunately there weren't too many in my favourite spot for photographing the twilight sky. I keep hearing things about the number of visitors to Mauna Kea dropping off but whenever I'm here the numbers just seem to be growing.

It was another cloudless sunset. That's fine for us doing astronomy, the weather for that is great at the moment although we could do with a tad more wind as we're getting some local seeing effects. Unfortunately, the cloudless sky meant another boring sunset, at least for me! The visitors didn't seem to think so though...

Moonrise into shadow

This evening's sunset was rather uninteresting without any high clouds to light up the sky, however, behind most of the tourists' backs to the east was an amazing sight - the full moon rising in the shadow of Mauna Kea. The three hikers coming down from the summit probably didn't realise that a few of us had spotted the the shadow and moon and that they would appear on a few photos!

To be honest, the view wasn't a surprise. We've recently had a lunar eclipse so the moon is still aligned closely with the sun and therefore a full moon should rise close to the antisolar point (the point in the sky opposite the sun), and that's exactly where Mauna Kea's shadow appears. The only thing I wasn't sure about was whether the moon would be close enough to the node to be in the shadow, and fortunately it was! On the bad side, however, I broke my tripod. Rats.

Felicia

This might get interesting. Hurricane Felicia, currently about 2000 miles from my house, is on track to get a little too close to the Big Island for comfort. For the first time in a year or two I saw the local TV station weather people actually say we need to keep an eye on this storm. Not that I think they know what they're talking about, but they're usually OK when it comes to storms we can clearly ignore.

This one is headed to the Big Island but the current forecast is that it'll likely weaken into a tropical storm as it gets close to home as it tracks over colder water. It'll also meet high-level winds that'll probably tear it to pieces before it gets here and we might just get some rain and perhaps some stunning sunsets from Mauna Kea's summit!

You never know, though. We've had some pretty close calls during the last few years and it's only a matter of time before a hurricane actually hits one of the islands here again, but for now it looks as though Felicia will fizzle out. In any case, I hope that's what happens.

So unpleasant

It's almost midnight and it's unbelievably hot and humid. Tropical Storm Lana is likely to blame for this, it's just passed, thankfully, to the south of the island but it's lived up to its name and brought real tropical conditions behind it. The thermometer reads near 80 degrees and the humidity is close to 90% and there's no wind whatsoever. I have Celtic genes and these conditions simply don't agree with me. I can live with them during the day when it usually gets up to 90 degrees at my place, but not in the middle of the night!