Pyrographic presents

As the end of the season approached, and it came time for us seasonal field technicians to say goodbye to NEON, I decided to make some little gifts for all my coworkers. Between moving and work I didn't have a lot of time to think about it (or make things) so I settled rather hastily on some small wood-burning (pyrography) pieces. Since I get bored of doing the same thing over and over I decided to do a unique design for each person based on what I knew they liked or enjoyed about the work we did. I've grouped them into a few categories below:

1. Plants

ʻĀhinahina (silversword) and Peperomia sp.

I did these for two coworkers who mentioned these plants as being their favorites. On the left is a Mauna Loa silversword (Argyroxiphium kauense), or ʻāhinahina in Hawaiian. We were privileged to see some of these that were outplanted in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve (out of reach of voracious ungulates!), and they're just as beautiful as the Mauna Kea species.

Leaves of Peperomia sp. from beneath

The disk on the right shows leaves from a species of Peperomia (using the photo above as reference). There are over a thousand recognized Peperomia species (at least twenty-two in Hawaii alone), and there are thought to be more since they can be hard to tell apart and positive identification can be very difficult. While we normally would (and could) identify most plants to the species level with confidence, we simply couldn't identify any peperomias we found to better than the genus level. They're pretty plants, though, with strikingly-colored undersides to their leaves.

2. Beetles

Mecyclothorax neonomas and M. rufipennis

As part of the work we did we collected, identified, and preserved various Carabidae beetles. Members of this large and varied family are found around the world, with both native and invasive species present in Hawaii. Shown here are two native species from the genus Mecyclothorax, M. neonomas on the left and M. rufipennis on the right. M. neonomas was actually discovered just a few years ago at our site from the kind of collection work we did (one of two such species), which is pretty neat! We didn't find any new species this year (beetles in general were scarcer than the previous few years), but there could be more out there waiting to be discovered…

3. Birds

Nēnē, ʻiʻiwi, & ʻalalā

Birds ended up being the biggest category, as we got to see a lot of endangered and rare native birds in the Natural Area Reserve. Nēnē were a very common sight; we would often see between ten to twenty on any given day. (This was the first one of these wood-burnings that I made, so it's a bit less polished than the others as I was relearning it on the fly). In the middle is an ʻiʻiwi, a striking native scarlet honeycreeper with a dramatically curved bill. I modeled this after a photo of one perched on a māmane tree, and while I didn't get its front quite right I like the contrast with the black wing and tail feathers. (The light was at a poor angle for this disk specifically, so I had to play with it a bit in GIMP to get it to look better.)

The third bird is one which I haven't actually seen personally, and isn't currently at the site: it's an ʻalalā, the Hawaiian crow. By 2002 there were no known wild individuals, with just a few remaining in captivity. Intensive breeding and rehabilitation programs have increased the captive populations to the point where some individuals were released into the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve several years ago…where they were unfortunately quickly predated by ʻio, the Hawaiian hawk. One of my coworkers, before joining NEON, was part of this effort and used to track the birds around the reserve, so I made this for him. (Amusingly, he immediately could tell from it that I'd used a reference photo of a not-quite-adult bird ­– something I didn't know – as its head was still a little big for its body.) In some good news, around a dozen ʻalalā were recently released in the wild on Maui where there are no ʻio, so hopefully they'll be able to re-establish a wild breeding population there and eventually bring them back to the forests of Hawaiʻi.

4. Tower

The fourth and final category has just a single disk, but it's probably the one I'm most proud of. I made it based on a photo I took of the top of our instrument tower seen through the trees along one of our trails, and I managed to get a lot of details in there. Here's the photo in question, for reference:

Funnily enough, this photo is now out of date: two weeks ago, during my last week with NEON, some site infrastructure people came out and moved one of the boom arms visible on the left to the other side of the tower to better sample the prevailing wind direction. When the tower was originally built in 2018 it was laid out using data on wind direction from Pohakuloa up on the saddle, and no one seems to have thought to question if the wind patterns were the same for a different site. (Spoiler: they aren't.) Our tower had thus, for its existence, had the wind-sampling equipment off to the wrong side for the prevailing winds. It wasn't a huge problem by any means (the tower being in the way probably wasn't affecting things too much), but it's good that it's fixed now.

And that's it! It was nice to have motivation to pull out my wood-burning kit again; when I originally got it I imagined I'd be doing a bit more than I have (so far it's pretty much just been the two pieces in this previous post). Several people said I should sell these, which…with some more practice…we'll see if that goes anywhere, I suppose. A hui hou! (And if any of my coworkers are reading this, thanks for being such an awesome group of people!)

P.S. Also, after a week of intensively cleaning my old place, I'm finally fully moved out, and can concentrate on things around the new place.

Endings (with NEON) and new beginnings

Phew, it's been a month! As mentioned in my last post, my job with NEON has officially ended as of the 20th. I'm also still “moving,” in the sense that I'm still cleaning up my old place and transferring things over to the new one. Moving while simultaneously working a physically-demanding job has been…a lot! But with the free time on my hands this week I've been able to get a significant amount of work done at the old place, and I'm on track to be completely done and moved out by the end of the month.

So yes, this'll be another short post, as my brain is still a bit frazzled by the thousand-and-one things that all need to get done between moving out and moving in. I've got some projects I managed to squeeze out among everything else the past few weeks which I plan to show off soon, once things have calmed down some more.

In all the hustle and bustle I haven't had much time yet to reflect on the end of my time with NEON. It's had its ups (great people, interesting work) and downs (rain!), but it's definitely strange not heading up Mauna Loa this week. I'll have a retrospective on this job when my thoughts have settled a bit more and I've had some time to recover from the previous two hectic months. By my count this is the eighth job that's come to an end for me, so, while it's never easy, it's something I'm (unfortunately) quite familiar with by now. Thankfully none of my coworkers are planning to move off-island (something else I'm familiar with from astronomy jobs ending), so as a band of fire-forged-friends we're able to keep in touch outside of work.

As per usual, I've amassed several project ideas over the past few months which I've been itching to work on. I'll still be somewhat busy in December organizing the new place and preparing for my family to visit in January, but I should finally have some time to pursue some new avenues. I've found myself interested in checking out Typst, a sort of re-imagining of \(\LaTeX\) from the ground up. I've also recently been thinking about getting into woodworking. The new house has a space that looks like it was used for that purpose, and for various reasons (I needed a lawnmower, and there were some amazing Black Friday sales on) I now own several power tools for the first time in my life. We'll see where that goes, but I'm excited. A hui hou!

A move update

Just a quick update to say that the move I mentioned last time has, in a sense, happened. I say “in a sense” because I've moved most of my furniture (with the help of some friends!) and have been sleeping at the new house for the past two weeks, but since I'm also still working full time I haven't yet managed to completely clean everything out of the old place and am also still working on some aspects of the process (like getting internet access set up in the new place).

I've also been doing some interesting things at work as we begin to wind down for the season. We finished our beetle collection earlier this month and have started mounting all the beetles we caught this year (~240) for preservation. I've never mounted insects before, but it's a satisfying arts-and-craft sort of activity in the lab. I've been enjoying it, and once things calm down a bit more I hope to have some photos of the process to show. My last day at work will be November 20th, so I'll have some more free time on my hands before too long (which I am definitely looking forward to, trying to move while also working full time has been…rather exhausting, to say the least). A hui hou!

A move, and a Hawaiian cheesecake

I haven't mentioned it until now, but I'll be moving tomorrow to a new place about 15 minutes' drive outside of Hilo to the town of Pepeʻekeo. It's been a more drawn-out process than moving usually is for me, which is partly why I hadn't mentioned it; it involves moving to a house my parents bought in advance of retirement and, for once, I've been able to set my own time-table. I've been shuttling small loads of stuff to the new place the past few weeks, but tomorrow marks the big move of furniture and changing where I sleep. I'll never enjoy moving, but at least I get to pick when I need to be out by, and can do the moving and then come back and clean (and perhaps finish moving non-essential stuff) after a week settling in rather than needing to get it all done at once.

That's mostly just to say that it might be a bit quiet around here as I get moved in and go through the excruciating process of readjusting all my routines that moving always entails. I don't want to end this post without pointing out something I baked last month, though!

This is an ʻōhelo berry cheesecake I made for a social gathering. The ʻōhelo are present in the form of a compôte on top of a basic cheesecake, and it came out quite well. Even after making this and the pie from before I still have a few cups of ʻōhelo berries in the freezer, so I'm still thinking about what to make with them. There are lots of recipes involving blueberries out there (muffins, perhaps?), so we'll see what I come up with! A hui hou!

Visiting Hakalau Natural Area Reserve

A few weeks ago on September 13 I had the opportunity to attend the annual Find Your Wild open day high on the slopes of Mauna Kea. This event happens only once a year and is limited to 500 people, but it allows members of the public to access the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge (part of the Natural Area Reserve System, or NARS) and see the rare plants and birds found there. Since we work in a fellow Natural Area Reserve and know many of the people working at Hakalau, most of us from work went as a group.

There were a variety of events going on over the course of the day, with the mains ones being a several-mile-round-trip hike through the woodland in the process of being restored, a tour of the greenhouse where plants are propagated (though we missed out on that), and lots of booths from various conservation organization around the island and state. Judging by the photography equipment a lot of people were there to see the rare native birds, such as the ʻiʻiwi, ʻapapane, ʻakepa, ʻakiapōlāʻau, and ʻelepaio (and others I'm forgetting). We see those birds occasionally in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve where we work, but on the older slopes of Mauna Kea where the forest has had more time to turn lava rock into nutritious soil the sheer number of birds we saw was incredible. These birds no longer exist at lower elevations (where most of the island's population lives) due to mosquitoes and the deadly avian malaria they carry, so few people get to see or hear them without taking trips to high-elevation woodlands.

Part of the hike. Other than a few trees the entire area was clear-cut just a few decades a go.

Speaking of plants, we also got to see some rare varieties of those. Some of them appear at Puʻu Makaʻala, but again there were some Mauna Kea-specific species which I hadn't seen before. We got to hear from a conservationist there about one particular plant in the mint family, Phyllostegia brevidans, which was first described in 1862 and then disappeared from the record and was thought extinct for around a hundred and fifty years. Sometime earlier this century a single specimen was found by an exploring conservationist. He took some samples, which took six years to be identified from leaf samples in the Bishop Museum collection, after which he was able to return to the same individual plant to try to collect seeds. The plant was half-dead, with a single bunch of moldy fruit, but the seeds he got (remarkably) sprouted, and with some care and attention (and an ungulate-free enclosure to grow in) the plants were returned to the wild and many individuals are now thriving.

However! P. brevidans was previously pollinated by the nectivorous ʻiʻiwi, whose long, curved bills perfectly fit the plant's long, curved flowers. But its numbers had dropped so low for so long that ʻiʻiwi simply passed it by when it was replanted; they likely hadn't seen any in generations, and had completely lost the part of their cultural knowledge that told them it was edible. Thankfully, after some years they eventually figured it out again, and as of a few years ago are once again feeding from (and pollinating) their long-lost symbiotic flora. I can't tell it nearly as well as I heard it, but it was a truly inspiring success story of conservation.

I couldn't get a good photo of the several ʻiʻiwi I saw, so here's a gorgeous 3D-printed one! (Life-size.)

Overall it was a really interesting experience, and was a great way to see some rare and endangered birds and plants. It's a long drive to get there along Mana Road, but it offers some great views that I hadn't seen before. We'll see how often I get to go again (as it requires signing up before slots fill up), but I enjoyed the experience a lot. A hui hou!

A Hawaiian pie

It has been a very busy month here for me, which is why it's been so long since my last post. Some of the busyness has been pleasant (birthday parties!), some…more neutral (being in a hotel while my apartment building was tented this week), but all of it left me with little downtime or drive to write.

One exciting development is that last week I finally managed to make the pie I've been meaning to since about May! The idea was sparked by a comment from a coworker about how one could theoretically bake a pie using ʻākala (native Hawaiian raspberries) and ʻōhelo (native Hawaiian blueberries). The ʻākala ripen earlier (around May/June), so while I had some in the freezer ready to use for a few months it wasn't until late August/early September than the ʻōhelo really started ripening in significant amounts. Once they did, though, I was able to pick a lot – easily a few cups of berries in a quarter-hour's work. I ended up with so many that I didn't even use them all up making the pie, and will have to find some other use for them…

Thankfully, the pie came out well! I used the recipe I mentioned in my previous post (where I made it with raspberries and blueberries), and only added about a fourth of a cup of additional sugar. It wasn't an especially sweet pie, but it wasn't tart as I had feared the ʻākala would make it. (It's interesting to me how red the filling is – while related to blueberries, ʻōhelo are generally more red or reddish-purple in color.) I ended up making it after a particularly draining day at work (an arduous protocol that involved much tromping through the forest, under a sky that rained off-and-mostly-on all day) so I didn't get too fancy with the crust, but I did scratch the unofficial D20 logo into it. (It was also our last day doing that protocol this year, so it served as a nice celebration for finishing it.)

Anyway, just a quick post today as I'm technically still lodging at the hotel even though my place was cleared for re-entry this morning – the gas company won't come out to turn on the gas until Monday so I don't have any hot water or stove. I've got some interesting photos from visiting the annual Hakalau Natural Area Reserve open day last week, so look forward to those when I finally get a chance to catch my breath (hopefully this week!). A hui hou!

Checking out the new USGS building in Hilo, with drones!

There's a new building under construction on the UH Hilo campus (near to several places I have worked/am working), which when completed will house the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) and the USGS Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center (PIERC). It's replacing a previous HVO building which was located in Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park and was damaged in Kīlauea's 2018 eruption; this new one will be closer to staff who live in Hilo and students from the UH campus. Preparation of the lot started last year but construction really picked up this spring, and since I drive by it most days I've been able to watch its progress. And as a construction site not really near lots of people, I felt comfortable bringing out my Avata for some FPV exploration.

Along with my Mini 3 Pro; the video below contains footage from both. This was recorded on the 4th of July weekend, though I had to go back and reshoot the FPV footage on a different day because I was still figuring out which lens profiles worked with Gyroflow for post-production stabilization. (Note to self: It's the Wide profile that works, not Normal or [as you might think] Extra Wide). It's a slight shame since the weather was absolutely beautiful the first day, but the FPV footage I got the second time was better overall so it all works out.

I'm pretty happy with the resulting video. I couldn't really figure out a way to make a single long FPV shot look good, but I like the cutting between wide establishing shots and the more interesting individual fly-throughs. The music actually does stop like that halfway through (though I extended the pause slightly), and when I saw that collision in my footage I thought it was too funny not to sync them up. The recovery makes me smile, as I had basically nothing to do with it – the Avata can sometimes autonomously recover from collisions when you'd hardly expect it to.

It turns out I got that footage at pretty much the optimal point in the construction process as just the next week they started filling in the walls, making the main building less see-through and (probably) harder to fly through. I hope I get a chance to visit when it's complete, as they're going to have some amazing views of Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and the Saddle between them from that north lanai. We'll see how it goes! I don't know how much longer construction will take, but I'd imagine it'll finish sometime next year. A hui hou!

Tsunami (2025 edition)

Well, it's been a while since I last used the tsunami label on a post! Looking back I used it six times between 2010 and 2014, then…not until now. The first three years I lived in Hawaii each had a tsunami alert (two important enough to use the sirens), which primed to me think of them as roughly annual events. But then I haven't experienced one since 2014 (I don't think there were any while I was away in Australia), so when we started hearing tsunami watches (and then warnings) on the radio on Tuesday the 29th while working up at the Natural Area Reserve it was something of a blast from the past.

Thankfully, much like the others I've experienced living here, this one proved relatively uneventful. I've seen a reported wave height in Hilo of 4.9 feet, which was enough to flood some parking lots (and probably the first floors of some buildings) along the coast, but not enough to cause major damage. The wave was initially estimated to arrive just after 7 PM; it was still just light enough (right after sunset) that I put my drone in the air for about twenty minutes to see if I could see anything in the bay. The actual arrival happened around 8:30 PM, though, when it was far too dark to be see anything. (I also saw another drone in the air while I was up there, so I wasn't the only one with that idea.)

This was the largest tsunami alert since 2011, large enough that the sirens were activated – and since Friday was the first of the month, they also got activated for the usual first-of-the-month test, so I got to hear them twice in four days. Since I'm (decently far) out of the evacuation zone where I live it ended up being a relatively normal evening for me, but it's a good reminder that life's never boring when you live on a volcano in the middle of the Pacific! A hui hou!

Zoo, part two

I mentioned back in May how I went to the Panaʻewa Rainforest Zoo just south of Hilo for the first time on my birthday, and how that happened to be a rainy day. While I did enjoy my visit and the lack of crowds caused by the rain, I wanted to go back at some point when it wasn't raining to get more photos of the animals. I finally went about a month later, in June, which is about a month ago from when I'm writing this post as it's been pretty busy for me in the intervening weeks.

I found myself drawn back to several of the same animals, as the change in weather had some clear effects on their behavior or look. The red iguana above already looked good in the rain, but positively glows in the sunlight with an iridescent sheen. (And also appears to be enjoying itself from this angle.)

Similarly, I once again ended photographing the bumblebee poison dart frogs, which were much more active this time. Whereas before they were pretty much motionless, this time I saw several climbing or jumping around the enclosure. I think they were being fed, as this little group kept bobbing their heads forward and darting their tongues towards the mesh.

I did end up with a few photos that weren't just repeats, such as this one of the alligator in its enclosure.

I also got a nice shot of this golden crowned crane, native to Africa and the national bird of Uganda. I had to get in position with my phone then make a little noise to get it to look at me, but it worked out!

Overall it was a fun time. It was interesting to see how the animals' behaviors changed (or didn't) with the weather, and the lighting let me appreciate various colors better. There were a lot more people there with the sunny weather, but not enough to feel too crowded.

This is a little unfortunately timed, in that the zoo will begin charging a small admission fee in August, so this weekend is one of the last times to visit for free. I can see the reasoning behind it, and there's a relatively cheap annual pass so it shouldn't be too hard for people to continue going, but it's still a bummer. We'll see how it goes, I suppose, perhaps the revenue will allow for expansion and renovation (there are a few places noticeably empty at the moment which could have animals in them). A hui hou!

Hilo Bonsai Exhibition, 2025 edition

This past weekend I spent a night observing on Keck, and the weekend prior my parents were in Hilo, so it's been something of a busy month for me with less downtime than usual. I've got a few post ideas backing up as a result which I hope to get out before too long, and for today's post I want to get back to something that happened last month (on Tau Day, even!), a visit to the annual bonsai exhibition at the Wailoa Art Center.

There was a lot of impressive topiary on display, and while walking around to see and photograph it one thing I saw there stuck with me: a little placard that said something like, “Bonsai is not about making a big tree small, but about making a small tree look big.” It inspired me to look in a different way while taking pictures; instead of simply snapping a shot from my vantage point (usually looking down on a piece), I tried taking a few shots as if from the ground looking up at a normal-sized tree.

This one benefited from the light pouring in on it from above, which lit it up in a striking manner. I went about an hour before it closed in the late afternoon, since I was finally feeling better that day after being sick with COVID-19 the entire week (for the third confirmed [and probably sixth overall] time). The way the leaves are illuminated from above reminds me of working in the forest, especially since this month we started a data-collection protocol involving measuring the crowns and canopies of trees (with a lot of associated looking upwards, usually right into the Sun overhead).

And while this one isn't that little – it's probably a good two feet high – a low angle helps it look even larger. Cut out the background and you could fit this tree in a landscape with little difficulty (other than the fact that I cropped the edges out; whoops).

Anyway, I've got some more post ideas and projects in the works that I just haven't had the time or mental energy to get out yet, but with this weekend hopefully going back to normal I might be able to make some progress on that front. We'll see! A hui hou!

Happy Two Pi(e) Day 2025!

It's that time of year again folks! By which I mean Tau Day, 6/28, and Michael Hartl's annual State of the Tau update. Looking back over my blog, I realize this marks ten years since I made my first post on Tau Day back in 2015 (with one every year since except for 2017, where I seem to have simply forgot).

Since you're probably tired of me explaining over and over again why \(\tau=2\pi\) is a more natural circle constant than \(\pi\), let me instead share some (photos of) actual pies. You see, up in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve where I work a lot of plants are busy producing various fruits over the summer. Two of those happen to be the native Hawaiian raspberries (Rubus hawaiensis), known as ʻākala, and the native Hawaiian blueberries (Vaccinium reticulatum & V. calicynum), known as ʻōhelo (though they're actually red in color).

ʻŌhelo and ʻākala are both edible, though neither are particularly sweet (and ʻākala in particular can be very tart). Last month someone at work suggested the idea of baking them into a pie (where some added sugar could combat the tartness), and this inspired me enough to go out, buy a pie pan, and make some practice pies. I used a recipe for blueberry & raspberry pie (which I'm pretty sure I made while I was in Australia), using store-bought berries to stand in for the Hawaiian versions.

Before baking…

…and after!

And I think it came it pretty well! This is the second of two practice pies I made, since the berries I bought turned out to be just enough for two. The top cover design is meant to be a stylized view of a D20 die (or icosahedron), since we're the 20th domain in NEON and often abbreviated D20 (and have shirts with such a design on them). This was my first time making my own dough (I just used pre-made pie crusts in Australia), and while I think it could be slightly tweaked and improved I'm pretty happy with how it came out (both visually and taste-wise!).

I haven't had much time to collect berries from the field the past two weeks, but this week should provide me opportunity. Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a picture of an ʻākala pie from another conservation team on the island, so I'm clearly not the only person experimenting with it. A hui hou!

He hōkū hou: catching nova V462 Lupi

I didn't quite get this post out on the solstice, but I do have some astronomy-related news! On June 19th I saw a Sky & Telescope article about a newly-discovered nova in the constellation Lupus, V462 Lupi. As a quick reminder, a nova happens when a white dwarf accretes enough hydrogen from the atmosphere of a companion star that it ignites in a thermonuclear explosion, causing the white dwarf to brighten by millions of times (though usually leaving it intact). “Nova” is simply Latin for “new” as the resulting brightening looks like a new star among the fixed denizens of the night sky (and “he hōkū hou” in the title is simply Hawaiian for “a new star”).

After V462 Lupi was discovered on June 12th at a magnitude of 8.7, by the 19th it had brightened up to a naked-eye visibility of around 5.5. I've managed to catch Uranus by eye at around that magnitude from the Visitor Information Station before, so on a whim I decided to head up on the evening of the 20th to see if I could catch this nova. (The AAVSO light curve showed that it seemed to be plateauing, so I figured it might start to fade soon and I wanted to catch it before it did.)

The weather wasn't fully cooperating, as there was a faint high-level cloud layer to the south where Lupus lay along the Milky Way. Visibility was pretty good, all things considered, but everything was just slightly blurry from all the water vapor in the air. I could make out the broad strokes of the dusty rifts in the Milky Way, but none of the fine filamentary structure. Thankfully there was no Moon (something I forgot to check beforehand), which let me see the zodiacal light in the west as the Sun sank below the horizon from my perch atop Puʻu Kalepeamoa.

While I wasn't able to see the nova, thanks to modern technology I was able to capture it in a five-minute exposure with my Google Pixel phone. (I continue to be impressed at the astrophotography capability of this phone, as you may remember from my excursion to catch comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS last year.) It's not the most beautiful picture of the night sky I've seen, but considering the quality of the seeing it had to work with it's remarkable it came out as well as it did.

Ta-da!

Oh, you can't see the nova? Yeah, me neither. There are far too many stars visible – I'm not sure what the limiting magnitude is, but I've found stars as faint as magnitude 9.5, so there are a lot more stars here than you could see with the naked eye. Let me notate the constellations visible in this photo…

All right, that's better! (I've taken a few liberties in drawing the asterisms.) At least we know where we're looking now. I had to aim by trial-and-error so I didn't manage to center Lupus in the shot on this try, but the nova is in view. It's near where the arm of Centaurus approaches Lupus, around that triangle formed by Delta Lupi, Beta Lupi, and Kappa Centauri, so let's zoom in…

…way in. Just north of the triangle I mentioned is another little triangle of stars (I've marked both in orange in this image to distinguish them). And just north of that triangle's eastern (left) tip is our nova! That eastern star in the little triangle is magnitude 5.8, and it looks like V462 Lupi was about as bright at the time. That would probably have been visible had the sky been clear, but them's the breaks in astronomy; we can't fight the weather, merely live with it. My retinas probably collected a few photons from it over the time I spent staring in that direction, and I'm primarily happy that I got a photo I can share.

And if we go back to the wide-field annotated photo, I caught a few bonus deep-sky goodies in Centaurus! Omega Centauri shines brightly where I've circled it, and inspection reveals the fuzzy, non-stellar nature of this massive globular cluster. Even more impressive, however, is that a five-minute exposure with my cell phone camera shows a hint of the active, unusual galaxy Centaurus A, at a respectable 11–13 million light-years away! (I've imaged both of these objects before, if you want to see what they look like up close: Omega Centauri, Centaurus A.)

Anyway, that's my little near-solstice adventure this year. It's always fun to be reminded of changes in the heavens, especially when they're (theoretically) visible to the naked eye! A hui hou!

A rainy birthday zoo visit

Just south of Hilo lies the Panaʻewa Rainforest Zoo & Gardens. It's the only zoo in the United States located in a rainforest, it's free to enter, and in over a dozen years of living in Hilo I…have never visited. Recently there have been discussions about needing to start requiring an entrance fee, and now that I pass by it several times a week for my new job I decided to fix that oversight and visit for my birthday.

Despite the fact that it was pouring down rain today. Actually, even in spite of the rain I still had a fun time. I went with my friend Josh who had visited multiple times before but hadn't been in over a decade, and he was able to point out some of the changes and improvements. I managed to take some surprisingly good photos despite the rain, so have a few of them:

A bumblebee poison dart frog in its enclosure.

It's not a very large zoo – it took us perhaps a bit under two hours to see everything – but I found that rather nice; I've visited much larger zoos that took all day to see everything, and it does get a little exhausting after a while. This was a refreshingly ‘bite-sized’ zoo.

A red iguana chilling in the rain. Despite appearances, it was awake and watching me.

And it's not like it lacked for interesting animals, either. I'm only showing the better photos I managed to get, but it's got a neat selection of reptiles and amphibians, including several species of poison dart frogs and various chelonians. There are four native Hawaiian birds, the pueo (owl), ʻio (hawk), ʻalalā (crow) and nēnē (goose), multiple primates and a number of brightly-colored tropical birds, some peafowl who roam the park, tigers, emus, and even some binturongs and an alligator. 

A pueo, the native Hawaiian owl.

All in all it was a fun excursion, and with how close and easy to visit it is I'm a bit embarrassed I never visited sooner. I'm actually quite impressed with how well some of the photos I got with my Pixel 9 Pro came out despite the rain (and me juggling an umbrella in one hand), and I'm interested in coming back on a clearer day to spend some more time and see what else I can get.

A couple of emus in the rain. I knew better than to get my phone (and fingers) up close to them…

And altogether that made for a fun and memorable 36th birthday. My birthday hasn't been on a weekend since 2020, and since I'm usually saving vacation time for trips it was nice to have a relaxing day off to myself this year. (Especially after spending a rather chillier and less pleasant rainy day in the field earlier this week.) A hui hou!

A new job with NEON

It's been four weeks since I started my new job with NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network (managed by Battelle), long enough for me to start settling in and having a chance to catch my breath. There's been a lot to learn. The past few weeks have been a blur of trainings on various data-collection protocols, learning to identifying dozens of plant species, and a procession of trips to various pre-established plots in the rainforest for data collection. (Plus a little bit of lab work.)

Being up at altitude near dawn for mosquito collection is rough, but the dewy grass is incredible.

NEON's mission is to provide a decades-long collection of ecological data from a network of locations across the US, so the various protocols are designed to get that data in a standardized format from diverse locations. There are twenty ‘domains’ across the US (of which we are Domain 20), which may have multiple sites where data is collected (though there's only one site in Hawaii). This data is open-source and available for anyone to use, a fact which fits my personal leanings very nicely. (Having an ORCiD already set up from my time in astronomy proved useful as we use them for attaching credit to data collection, so I may be able see data I've collected used and attributed in future papers.)

Some Astelia menziesiana (an endemic lilly) on a log.

Collecting such data isn't necessarily easy, though! In addition to the simple fact of the collections sites being located around 5,000–6,000 ft (~1,500–1,800 m) up the side of Mauna Loa, the nature of many protocols involves strict time sampling restrictions, which might require spending the day working in rain. (We're supposed to evacuate in thunderstorms, but those are rare near Hilo.) Even without rain spending 6+ hours in the field is no joke; some plots may have a lot of hard lava rock underfoot, while others (especially with feral pigs present) may be slippery mudholes. I've been amazed by the number of fallen logs in some of the older sections of the forest, which combined with the undergrowth can make getting around something of a challenge. We work four 10-hour days, and while the three-day weekend is nice there's no denying that working that long can be grueling, especially on field days.

Me recording data in a light drizzle.

Still, it's not without its upsides. While it can be uncomfortably hot, cold, or wet at times, at others it can be fairly pleasant. The work itself is interesting; while I had some experience identifying plants before, I'm learning all kinds of new, native plant species, and finding them for the plant diversity protocol is rather like a treasure hunt. Depending on the plot, we might find trees some 500 years old, or be exploring relatively younger lava flows from Mauna Loa perhaps a mere 250 years old. There's little human presence in the Natural Area Reserve where we work (although it's technically open for hiking), and the still-intact native forests house native birds which are rare elsewhere.

We often see nēnē at the site; I think I saw more my first day than in all my time here previously.

I've also found the labwork, though a far cry from anything I've done before, to be interesting. So far I've sorted leaf-litter from our leaf-litter traps, seeing how the distribution of species varies from plot to plot, and identified beetles from our beetle traps. The particular beetles we're interested in are called carabids, and while most species on the mainland are ground beetles, our native Hawaiian species are arboreal (though we still manage to catch them in our ground traps, somehow). There have actually been two entirely new species found in our traps in years past, which is certainly an exciting prospect.

Leaf litter sorting, into various piles for things like leaves, flower, seeds, twigs, etc.

After four weeks I'm not sure if this is something I want to continue doing indefinitely, but I've got a wonderful group of motivated, clever, and fun coworkers to work with and there are certainly fascinating aspects to the project and sights I wouldn't see otherwise. Perhaps I'll feel differently after a few more months. We'll see! A hui hou!

A Handel Easter hymn

Happy Easter, dear readers! A few weeks ago I accidentally introduced a hymn we sang in church today, Thine Is the Glory (or Thine Be the Glory, I've seen both titles). To explain, the music for the hymn comes from George Frederic Handel's oratorio Joshua, from a chorus titled “See, the conqu'ring hero comes!”. We've been going through the book of Joshua in Sunday School, and I'd been taking turns teaching while our regular teacher was away for a few weeks. I listened to Joshua (the oratorio) due to being reminded of it, remembered the hymn derived from it, and, since it's a resurrection song and Easter was a month away, introduced it to the class. Which reminded our music leader about it, causing him to pick it for Easter (despite it not being in our usual rotation). I felt like this was as good an excuse as any to digitally engrave some music, and whipped up the score below this afternoon for fun:

In the process I learned the difference between the Early Modern English verb forms ‘hast’ (second-person singular present indicative) and ‘hath’ (third-person singular present indicative) while checking lyrics, since some versions (incorrectly) used the latter instead of the former in the phrase “Thou o’er death hast won.”

There's an interesting history behind this tune, which you may see categorized in hymnals as “Judas Maccabeus”. You see, in 1746 Handel composed an oratorio titled Judas Maccabeus, which became one of his more popular oratorios. The next year in 1747 he composed Joshua, along with this tune. Joshua falls into what I would describe as “solidly average” for Handel; it's not bad by any means, and has its share of high points (I'm particularly fond of “A solemn March during the circumvection[sic] of the Ark of the Covenant”), but mostly didn't achieve the same popularity.

Except for this chorus, which is sometimes rated as Handel's second-most-famous chorus after the “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah. Noting its popularity, Handel went back and added it into Judas Maccabeus (perhaps in 1751, it's generic enough in wording that it fits), and the combination took off. Then in 1884 the music was used by Swiss hymn writer Edmond Louis Budry as the basis for a new hymn, “À toi la gloire,” or Thine Is the Glory when translated into English.

And that's the story of how a tune composed for one oratorio got named after a different oratorio and ended up in a hymn. (It helps that it's a relatively simple chorus sung in unison without any polyphony, making it pretty easy to sing.) History is truly fascinating sometimes. A hui hou!

Relaxing waves in Hilo bay

I'm starting my new job tomorrow, so I may be a bit preoccupied with that for a while as I settle into a new routine. I know some generalities about what I'll be doing, but the particulars remain to be discovered. (Though I'm expecting to be rather sore and tired for the next week or so.) I'll probably get some posts out of it in the future, at least!

Earlier this week, though, I took the opportunity of some high-surf days to get some drone footage of waves crashing over the breakwater in the bay and turned it into this video:

The observant may remember I did a similar video last year. While that one was taken in overcast, almost stormy conditions, the high surf days this week were on gorgeous, mostly-clear days, which made for a nice contrast. Where I went with some fast-paced music with that video, this one got some calmer music, slower editing, and some nice relaxing wave sounds. Anyway, hope you enjoy it! A hui hou!

Ancient Indonesian architecture

All right, one last post from my Indonesia visit: while I was there, we visited a couple of historical stone structures, two candis and a stupa. All of them were several centuries old, dating from around the 13th to the 15th centuries. The first one was Candi Singhasari, a syncretic Hindu-Buddhist structure thought to be the funerary temple of King Kertanagara (d. 1292), the final king of the Singhasari dynasty. It's an interesting construction, and it's impressive that it's still standing after centuries of earthquakes with such a relatively tall and narrow design (though it looks like some of the top portion has been dislodged).

Candi Singhasari

There isn't really an interior, just some small chambers.

About 6 km north of it is Sumberawan, a Buddhist stupa thought to have been constructed near the end of the 14th century or early 15th. It's rather unique, as it's the only Buddhist monument in East Java to have been constructed in the stupa style found elsewhere in Asia (with the rounded top) rather than the local candi style. It's located in a lush garden near a spring which was probably used for various rituals, and ties into its name: sumber means “(water) spring” and awan means “noon” in Javanese.

Sumberawan

Finally, we visited Candi Jago, a Hindu temple from the 13th century. It was apparently described as “majestic” in the Nagarakretagama, a 14th century document in Old Javanese whose translation in the 20th century helped inspire the Indonesian independence movement. It's hard to make out in the photos, but it's ringed in multiple layers of fine bas-relief, which are still there all this time later.

Candi Jago

When I visited I assumed these structures were composed of basalt, but while looking them up for this post I've learned it's actually andesite. Still a volcanic rock, though it's a little lighter gray rather than the darker black of basalt. It holds up quite well given the heat, humidity, and tropical rainfall of the area, though. Anyway, I thought these were interesting enough to share (especially Candi Singhasari, I like it's design). A hui hou!

Visiting Museum Angkut

Another thing we did while I was visiting my parents in Indonesia (and probably the last worth a post) was to visit Museum Angkut. I was told beforehand that it was essentially a sort of car museum, with various models on display (and some other vehicles). Which isn't necessarily a bad definition, but as we discovered that's a bit like calling the Hawaiian archipelago “a little isolated.”

To begin with: yes, it has a lot of old or rare vehicles. It has cars from Model Ts up to these 70s models that look like they've been stretched out, up through I think a few from the late 80s. Though as the photo shows, it also had a number of other vehicles, including a few helicopters, various military vehicles, the Indonesian equivalent of Air Force One, wooden scale models of various Asian ship designs, and some older vehicles like carts and rickshaws.

Oh, and lots of different bikes, of both the human-powered and motorcycle varieties. Including this bizarre two-person bicycle which I couldn't get over. Those wheels are around my height, they're huge!

And if that was all the museum had, I would've thought it an hour well-spent and considered it a good museum; everything was laid out nicely, with informative placards, and it was genuinely interesting seeing how car designs had changed over the century since their introduction. But then, trying to find the exit, we discovered that we'd only seen maybe 20% of what there was to see…

Outside the building we'd been in up to that point, we found alternating indoor and outdoor areas, done up to look like various places and times to show off even more antique vehicles. The street in the photo below was meant to look like Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century, and yes, everything you see there is within the museum ground.

The locations on display were both quite varied, and often impressively done. There was an “old Batavia” street from the late 1800s, the aforementioned Hollywood street, a Europe zone (indoors) with locations from Italy, France, and Germany in the 20th century, an outdoor Buckingham Palace, a Las Vegas area, and another Hollywood area where they had a number of cars from various movies such Ghostbusters.

The Buckingham Palace area.

Complete with mysterious royal flying unicorn!

This took perhaps another two hours or so to get through, and was all quite fascinating. And then we discovered that there was yet another part of the museum, called the Floating Market! I'm not sure if it was actually floating, but it was a collection of various food-and-souvenir shops set up around and on some islands in a water feature (interspersed with yet more exhibits, such as a dedicated section on Indonesian military vehicles). I forgot to get any photos of this part because I was starting to get a little overwhelmed after seeing so much (plus the intermittent rain wasn't making our time spent outside much fun, and most of this part was). We finally found the way back to the parking lot, only to run into even more parts of the museum along the way, such as one of those theaters where you strap into a moving seat that gives you a feeling of motion as you watch a video.

I came away very impressed, and also rather exhausted from the sheer number of different cars and set locations I'd experienced. (Not to mention people, I've mostly managed to avoid them in the photos above but the museum was quite decently busy.) I've been to a few vehicle museums before like the train museum in Sacramento or (most recently) the Air and Space museum in Tucson, and Museum Angkut felt really well-done. I'd have been impressed simply with the range of vehicles and models in the first building, but the areas after that really sold it as being an attraction worth visiting if you're ever in Batu (on the island of Java).

Were I to visit again I'd like to go on clear day, as the nature of the museum going from indoors to outdoors and back again several times meant that I couldn't enjoy the outdoors portions as much when it was raining, though we visited during the rainy season so that's on us. I also wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of things to see, so it got a bit overwhelming when I kept coming upon new things long after I was mentally prepared to be done – I'd love to see it again with a better idea of how much there was to see, as it was all very interesting. Anyway, I can definitely recommend it! A hui hou!

Visiting Indonesian watefalls

While I was visiting my parents in Java we went to see some nearby waterfalls, and since we didn't get rained out this time I was able to get my drone in the air for some video. I actually didn't think to take too many photos as a result, but I got a few from my vantage point on the ground.

Coban Palangi.

The first one we visited was Coban Palangi; “coban” means waterfall, and “palangi” means waterfall (with the ‘c’ being pronounced like a ‘ch’). This was the tallest and most visually impressive one, as it plunged over the rim above and generated a lot of mist in the valley below. It was overcast when we visited, so we didn't get to see a rainbow. (And why the photo looks somewhat washed out.)

Here's a shot of Coban Palangi from above. It was the most open of the three waterfalls, allowing me more freedom to maneuver and get different angles. That openness also required the most hiking, down from the road above into the valley where it was.

Coban Toris.

The next day we visited two more waterfalls near each other, Coban Toris and Coban Tarzan. These were both smaller waterfalls tucked away under canopies of foliage, which made them feel a bit cozier and meant I had to get creative with the limited range of drone shots I could get.

Coban Tarzan.

But if you'd rather see these watery wonders in motion, check out the video below from the footage I was able to take:

One interesting thing I did notice while hiking (and flying my drone) in the Javan rainforest is that there seemed to be very few flowers visible from above the treetops. Not that every tree here in Hawaii has flowers, but we do have a lot of the invasive African tulip tree which always seem to have a lot of bright orange flowers visible from above. I haven't tried to quantify the difference, but it was something I noticed while looking out across the jungle canopy while hiking into and out of the valleys where the waterfalls were.

Not much more to say about this, other than that I'm glad the weather cooperated after getting rained out at the tea plantation tour. I like waterfalls, as I'm sure is pretty clear from this blog, so it was neat getting to see some in other contexts and locations. A hui hou!