A backyard view

The views from my garden aren't as spectacular as those from my workplace on the summit of Mauna Kea, but they aren't too bad. We don't see too many rainbows at the summit for instance! Still, the sights can be nice, especially when the sun is setting. When I first moved here I had a nice view of the ocean but my palm trees have grown since then and now block the view. I don't think I'll chop them down though, I like the palms just as they are.

Last month we lost almost two-thirds of the available observing time at the summit due to weather. That's terrible, although someone pointed out that in 2006, when we had the "biblical" rain (40 days of continuous rainfall), we lost 80%. Tonight the cirrus is thick and we'll lose yet another night to weather - unlike radio telescopes we can't observe through thick cloud. On the other hand the clouds make the sunsets a little more spectacular, especially at the summit.

Cirrus and low cumulus clouds at sunset from the garden. One day I'll get a shot of the sun setting behind the mountains from here, but having no evening clouds in the west is rare - low cumulus clouds are blown in by the trade winds and bunch up against the mountains. They stay there until the temperatures drop at night so getting a clear sunset is unusual.

The high cirrus clouds, however, offer some interesting effects during the night.

Or you can just zoom in and take a shot of the moon and not worry about the cirrus.

Clouds

Some people love them

They know all the names,
Some people hate them
They're all of their banes,
Some see more sunshine
And some see more rain,
Some think they're pretty
And won't be too witty.

Please feel free to nominate your favourite cloud picture in your comments. I'd like to put one of the pictures on the front of a photo album for a very special person. The album won't include my poetry so you don't have to worry about that!

The first six images were taken from Mauna Kea's summit. The last two were taken from home this evening.

Edit: That 3rd picture isn't from the summit. Sorry for the misinformation. It's from the Saddle Road looking up at the summit.

Working in unison

Last night, to calm the nerves a little before we went live on air, I went out and took a few pictures of some Mauna Kea observatories in the middle of the night. That was a bit silly really, because 1) my intention was always to stay well out of view of the polycom's camera, which I did, and 2) while in the wings during the live webcast pull faces and do whatever I could to put everyone off (which I didn't do, of course!).

That first picture of the submillimeter telescopes turned out so well I took another zoomed in shot of the CSO and JCMT. The picture is a little noisier and not so dramatic, I'll live with that, but it shows both telescopes pointing in the same place. Was that simply coincidence? No, it wasn't.

Unfortunately, at least for us, the live webcast died just as the JCMT went on air which was a shame because it was an important night. The JCMT was hooking up with the CSO and the SMA on Mauna Kea as well as telescopes thousands of miles away in California and Arizona. They were all looking at the same thing at the same time using something called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. It's an incredibly complicated technique of observing, but if you get it right, hugely rewarding. It's something that radio telescopes have been doing for some years now, but the method gets harder as you shorten the wavelength (e.g., towards optical wavelengths, light our eyes can see). The Keck telescopes have been doing interferometry at optical wavelengths for some time now, but over a distance of a hundred yards or so, not thousands of miles! Optical interferometry at those sorts of distances is still quite a way in the future, but one day I'm sure will happen. Submillimeter wavelengths are shorter than radio waves, so at least we're now on the way to non-radio-wavelength VLBI.

Anyway, I'm digressing. The whole idea of VLBI is to create a telescope with a dish (in optical astronomy, a mirror or lense) with an effective diameter of thousands of miles. In simple terms, the larger a dish, the higher resolution it can achieve, that is, the more detail it can see. So the idea is to artificially create a telescope that's a significant size of the planet. The sensitivity won't be the same as a dish that large, but the resolution will be.

Getting all this to work is a massive task both technically and logistically. From what I've heard, those two hurdles have been overcome for the Mauna Kea observatories, but the data still have to come in from the observatories on the mainland and only then will we know if it's worked. I'll let you know when I find out!

On the other hand, UKIRT (foreground) and Gemini (background) were certainly not looking at the same thing!

Note that both observatories have windows or gaps in the side of their domes. Those are used to allow air into the domes to help equalize the temperature between the inside of the domes and the air outside, just like you might do at home on a hot summer's day. This helps to reduce local turbulence caused by rising warm air and therefore dramatically improve the image quality both telescopes deliver. Although VLBI might be quite some way in the future for telescopes such as these, they do what they can to get the best images possible!

And that's the end of the lecture. It'll be cat pictures tomorrow I think...

Old friends

As I write this the Around the World in 80 Telescopes webcast is continuing, I believe it's now got to some of the famous observatories on the west coast of the USA. I'm back on a dialup right now so there's no possibility of watching the live feed, but I'll catch up soon. Them's the breaks of living out in the sticks but the site is archiving each observatory's 20-minutes of fame so you can watch them again later. Earlier today I managed to catch the live feed from the UK's Jodrell Bank Observatory which is now available here I think. I loved it - Tim O'Brien did the prerecorded video and the live webcast. He's an old friend who I haven't seen for 15 years or so, and dammit, unlike me he hasn't aged a bit! The accent is a bit thicker than I remember though.

Tim's one of the smartest people I know but also very down-to-earth (if that's the right sort of description to give an astronomer). I thought he did a great job.

Mauna Kea live tonight: II

It's 10:45 at night and I took this photo just a few minutes ago, about one hour before we go live on air on Around the World in 80 Telescopes. I think it's one of my favourite photos. The telescopes you can see, from left to right, are the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Smithsonian Submillimeter Array (SMA). Hualailai is visible in the distance to the far left. It's a beautiful night, if a little cloudy.

UKIRT in the moonlight.

Mauna Kea live tonight

In just two hours at 23:00 HST (09:00 UTC) Around the World in 80 Telescopes will start with the observatories on Mauna Kea. The beginning of the night did not go smoothly for us, the weather was bad so we couldn't even open the dome and we also had communication difficulties, not something we need tonight! The shots above and below show the high clouds surrounding the summit at sunset as we worked on our technical problems.

In any case, the weather has improved a little and we're observing. I'm staying out of the limelight, I'm just here in case the telescope or instrument breaks, but we'll see you later tonight I hope!

100 hours of astronomy

For you astronomy enthusiasts out there 100 Hours of Astronomy starts on 2nd April. It's part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Included in the schedule is Around the World in 80 Telescopes which starts off with the observatories on Mauna Kea, Hawai`i.

I'll be up there during the broadcast, but probably (hopefully) behind the scenes! If, in the background, you hear a spanner hitting the ground followed by a swear word or two, you'll know I'm trying to fix something!

Sixty-three years ago today: tragedy at Laupahoehoe

At approximately 02:30 Hawaiian Standard Time (HST) on April 1st 1946 a huge earthquake occurred in the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific. It had a moment magnitude of 8.6 and generated an ocean-wide destructive tsunami. Close to the earthquake, at Unimak Island, the tsunami waves were estimated to be over 100-feet high as they struck the shoreline.

Less than five hours later the tsunami reached the Big Island of Hawai`i, well over 2,000 miles away from the epicentre. There was no warning as no system had been set up to provide tsunami warnings in the Pacific despite the fact that the earthquake had been detected by seismometers in Honolulu and at the observatory on Kilauea. The waves killed 159 people on the five main islands but perhaps the most tragic event occurred at Laupahoehoe on the Big Island's Hamakua coast.

Laupahoehoe (Leaf of Lava) is a small town and has a small but beautiful peninsula (Laupahoehoe Point) that extends a few hundred yards into the Pacific ocean. On that early morning schoolchildren were running around and having fun on the school's playing fields before the school day began. Just before 7-am the first wave struck the peninsula. Few realised the danger at first and although a scant-few people escaped the water, most didn't make it and were swept out to sea. Subsequent waves did more harm but the tragedy had already occurred. Twenty-five schoolchildren and teachers were dead.*

The 1946 Aleutian Islands earthquake and the terrible damage and tragedy inflicted around the Pacific, but especially in Hawai`i, led to the creation of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 1949.

Laupahoehoe Point taken from the cliffs to the south-east.

*Numbers vary slightly according to source.

A night in the life...

...of your typical Mauna Kea astronomer. I know many people are interested in exactly what we do on the mountain, so thought I'd provide a brief description of a typical day.

The "day" usually begins at around 3pm when the alarm goes off. I'll get up, take a shower and log on quickly to check the latest planetary alignments, ascendants and conjunctions on the numerous professional sites around the world. It'll give a good indication of the type of observations we need to make during the upcoming night. I then join all the other observatory staff at the Hale Pohaku dining room for dinner at 4pm although it really should be breakfast for us night owls. We'll discuss the position of the planets, what constellations they're in, how they're affecting our current lives and often argue about the influence that the moon and sun have on current politics. Retrograde motion and its link to the current recession is a particularly hot topic these days.

There's been a nasty rumour going around recently that the tables are segregated according to one's zodiacal sun sign, but I can assure you that's nonsense. Do you really think we'd allow a bunch of Geminis to sit together at one table for instance? They'd never leave for work with their constant chatter. Leos would be comparing their egos - imagine the chaos that would cause. No, we're a fully integrated group and encourage mixing and mingling at the tables, although when there are those rare and powerful planetary alignments we're a little more circumspect about who sits with who.

At around 5:30pm we all head up to the summit and to our various observatories. At this time of year the sun sets at around 6:45pm and we need a few minutes to measure the sun's position. It can be a little embarrassing to publish positions only to find out a day later that we thought the sun was approaching Aries when in fact it was solidly in Pisces, so we do our best to avoid those kind of mistakes.

At approximately 7:30pm the sky is dark enough to observe properly, and we spend the next few hours using a powerful survey camera to measure the positions of the constellations. If we need to confirm the identity of a particular star (it can be surprisingly difficult to do that at altitude with so many other stars visible) we'll switch to a spectrometer and identify it via its infrared spectrum.

This takes several hours to do because there's a large amount of sky to cover. We usually complete this task just after midnight, but if the moon is up it might take longer as we have to measure its position regularly. Compared to the stars the moon moves quite quickly, so it takes several measurements to determine its mean motion across the heavens.

So, typically by 1 or 2am we have the data we need and can plug them into the supercomputers every observatory has at the summit. After another hour or two they'll spit out the results which typically look like this:

At this point, around 3 to 4am, the circadian rhythm combined with our 14,000-foot altitude really kicks in and it's hard to stay awake, let alone think clearly. This is the best time to write the following day's sun-sign horoscopes for the newspapers so we'll spend the next hour doing that. During this time we allow the telescope to track a particularly attractive deep-sky object so we can send a nice image to newspaper science editors all over the world as well as the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.

By the time all that's done it's sunrise, so just a few more observations of the sun's position are made, a quick calculation using its current position and that measured at sunset is made and we can send off our prediction about the time for sunset tomorrow. The same measurements and results are sent in by all the observatories so a very good average can be made and all the various weather sites around the world will have accurate sunset and sunrise times for the next day.

Then it's back down for breakfast, a quick check of the early morning newspaper horoscopes as they should have our predictions in by now, and off to bed.

Taking it a little more seriously: part II

Since late last year I think I've spent about $500 on photography. This includes the camera, accessories and books. At Phototronics, Hilo's wonderful little store where you can buy just about everything you'll need if you're going to spend a few months in the wilderness hunting animals, defending yourself from federal agents and taking a few nice landscape photos, I bought some filters. Those they didn't have I just bought online, although I needed to buy a step-up ring for them - an ND 0.9 filter and a graduated ND (0.6) filter were things I really needed for sunsets, sunrises and perhaps the odd waterfall.

All these were cheap, I haven't spent money on expensive gear. Not yet, anyway. All I want to do right now is to learn about taking decent landscape photos and how to use the camera and accessories to do that without bankrupting myself.

So when is the next step coming? That's an easy question to answer. Not yet.

Obviously the next stage is to buy a proper DSLR camera with lenses. That's expensive and having forked out a couple of thousand dollars recently on car (and vacation) related things, it's not the right time. In addition, my PC can't even cope with RAW images produced by the FZ28, so god knows what I'd do if I had photoshop dealing with RAW images from a mega-megapixel DSLR. That's why I only shoot in JPG mode right now, my computer can't handle much else. So I'd have to buy a new PC plus camera. That's a lot of money. Oh, and the software as well.

Still, I'm now finding the limitations in the FZ28. It's a great camera, don't get me wrong, and fantastic for anyone who's just starting to get into photography like me. The detector has enough pixels to create huge prints and the optics and electronics are damn good, especially for the price. Unfortunately, although I often find some nice spots to take a picture, many of the suggestions from my photography books don't always work. I can't set the aperture to f/16 or f/22 to get an in-focus large depth of field because the lense doesn't go smaller than f/8. I often want to shoot in low light or darkness (I work at night - I'm an astronomer after all!) but I can't set the ISO high because the noise performance is noticeably poor at ISOs higher than 200-400. There's no flash hot shoe so am stuck with the camera's own flash unit (which is nasty, but then again so are most camera's, cheap or expensive) and no way to use a cable release, at least not that I can find - I end up using the timer-delay which works but is a little time consuming and frustrating if you want to time a shot to perfection (can I figure out if that wave will hit the cliffs in precisely 10-seconds?).

Having said all that, I now have my graduated ND filter and want to revisit a few places where I've managed to take a nice shot or two but have been frustrated by the contrast between the dark land and a bright sky - Kilauea Iki springs to mind. Wish me luck!