My quiet place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!