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!

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!

Trying (and failing) to catch Kīlauea fountaining

My friend Graham and I have, twice this month, attempted to catch the current eruption of Kīlauea only for the fountaining happening in its caldera to take a break the night before we visited. (It's currently in a stage of fountaining and resting in haphazard alternating bursts.) Our first trip, fog came in at dusk so thickly that we couldn't even see any glow from the caldera, but at least we were able to see something on our second outing.

We also did some hiking, including the hike along Sulphur Banks. I hadn't done that one before and found it quite a nice walk. It's in this sort of valley near the caldera with trees on the sides but little vegetation other than grass in the middle due to the heat underground, giving it this sort of idyllic quality (as seen below).

It also has places where elemental sulfur (from hydrogen sulfide reacting with water) form crystalline deposits, which is pretty neat.

While hiking Devastation Trail, I also found this vantage point where you can see Maunakea from. It's a cool perspective, with Kīlauea in the foreground, Mauna Loa in the middle, and the peak of Maunakea in the distance. From left to right, I'm pretty sure the observatories that can be seen upon it are Subaru, Gemini, and CFHT (though you might have to enlarge the picture).

And finally, with night falling, we were able to make out the glow of fresh lava on the floor of Hale Maʻumaʻu. I'd read there were some new lava flows, but it was fascinating to see it up close (especially since I was only expecting to see a bit of localized glow from the cracks in the lava lake, which is on the far side of the crater).

Overall it was fun to visit the volcano again and try to catch the ongoing eruption, even if Kīlauea wasn't playing ball. I hiked a few trails I wasn't familiar with and found some new favorites (the Sulphur Banks trails was especially nifty), and it's always cool to be reminded of the sheer scale of (one of) our local hole(s) in the crust. I don't know if I'll try to catch the fountaining again given how unpredictable this eruption is being, but we'll see! A hui hou!

Transplanting koa seedlings

Last week I had the opportunity to volunteer at the State Tree Nursery over in Waimea. We were helping transplant koa seedling from their germination beds into individual containers, to grow up a bit more before being used for reforestation efforts on Maunakea next year. If you remember when I volunteered to go planting back in the spring, this is where those saplings we were planting came from. It was interesting to see that, a bit like reading a prequel story. 

Here's a photo of what we were working with – hundreds of seedlings, germinated together in a bed on a table.

Each went into its own individual container, to grow until they're about waist height and ready for outplanting.

And here's how many we had left at the end of the day! I know I personally filled six racks of fifty containers each (plus helped fill a few more), so between volunteers and staff that were there that day we probably transplanted over two thousand seedlings, easily. Not all of them will survive when planted in the wild, but that's still quite a few trees that will go out next year! And this was just one day of four – I'll be heading back on the 27th for another day of transplanting.

In fact, as I took Old Saddle Road to Waimea in the morning, I drove by where I'd helped plant saplings earlier this year and caught glimpses of some of them in passing. I don't know how long koa take to grow – I imagine it's on the order of decades – so it'll probably be a while until they're majestic trees, but it was inspiring to see them growing there. Hopefully I'll have more opportunities to help with planting in the future. A hui hou!

Catching Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS

Tuesday evening I drove up Maunakea to the Visitor Information Station to see if I could spot Comet C/2023 A3, a.k.a. Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS. I hadn't felt particularly motivated to get up before dawn to see it earlier, but now that it's in the evening sky I figured I'd see if I could spot it.

For an astronomer, I'm a little embarrassed at how few comets I've actually seen. While solar eclipses (which I actually have never seen) either land in very out-of-the-way places or come at inconvenient times when I'm scrambling not to spend money on travel, I haven't lacked for chances over the past few decades to see comets (though a few, like Comet NEOWISE in 2020, did come at times when I wasn't really able to get somewhere dark enough to see them). Still, I don't have much excuse for missing Comet McNaught in 2007 or Comet Lovejoy in 2011. I did see Comet Holmes' remarkable brightening in 2007, though that was an unusual comet since we were seeing it almost head-on, so it didn't really display much of a tail. There are probably a few more I missed in that time span as well which I've forgotten; on the whole, I have a pretty poor track record of seeing naked-eye comets even when presented with the opportunity.

Which is why I found myself yesterday trudging up the path to the top of Puʻu Kalepeamoa in some extremely strong (and frigid) winds, setting up my GoPro for a timelapse, and waiting for the sunset. The timelapse didn't quite work out as planned since it failed to adjust the exposure time properly after it got dark, but I managed to get some photos, at least. 

The setting Sun through a māmane tree. They're in bloom this time of year.

The nearly-full Moon, unfortunately, wasn't doing the comet any favors as it lit up the night sky. I was first able to make it out maybe a half hour after sunset, then as twilight faded it became easily visible for perhaps another hour or so; by the time I left, nearly two hours after sunset, it was getting low enough on the horizon to be difficult to make out again.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Hualālai, with Venus at left.

With that, I can finally say that I've seen a proper, honest-to-goodness hairy star, and I have the pictures to prove it. Speaking of, I got those shots with my Pixel 7 Pro; not as good as a professional camera, but it's still remarkable to me just how good the software and hardware in phones has gotten, that it can capture shots like this in low light. (I did set it up on a tripod for stability, but still.)

Overall it was an interesting experience, and I'm glad I made the effort to see it. (Though after sitting out in those winds, maybe I should've gotten up to see it before dawn from Hilo, where it'd be warm[er] and humid instead of frigid and parched…) It should still be visible for a little while, perhaps the next few weeks; the Moon will start rising later and it'll be getting higher above the horizon, which will both make it easier to see, but it's also receding from the Sun which will make it get fainter, so there's a tension between the various effects. The next few days should still be good, though, and I'd recommend making the effort if you haven't seen it. I probably won't head up Maunakea again, but I'll try to keep an eye out for it from Hilo as it rises high enough now to be seen above the western horizon. A hui hou!

Reforesting Mauna Kea

Last week I took the opportunity for a new experience: helping plant trees with the Mauna Kea Forest Restoration Project. For background, much of the high-elevation slopes of Mauna Kea was originally upland forest. A lot of that forest was later cleared for grazing cattle or as a result of grazing by invasive ungulate species; I don't know the exact details, but the point is that a lot of former upland forests is now upland grasslands. Montane prairie? (It does tend to remind me of the prairies of Nebraska when I'm up there, and a co-worker mentioned it reminded him of Scotland.) I'm sure there's a term for it.

Anyway, the location this time was the Kaʻohe Restoration Area on the west side of Mauna Kea about 6,000 feet (~1,800 meters) up. The area is part of the habitat range of the endangered palila, of which only a few hundred individuals remain (mostly in the wild, though there's also a captive breeding program). The hope is that, by restoring the forests that originally blanketed the mountain slopes, palila and other various endangered native birds will have more habitat available and able to expand their ranges. The area we were planting in was directly along the highway running between Saddle Road and Waimea, so it'll be easy to spot the trees growing in future while driving by.

Drone view from above Puʻu Ahumoa, a cinder cone up mauka (uphill) of where we were planting.

This time we were planting koa seedlings, a tree in the Acacia genus endemic to Hawaii famed as a hardwood for making canoes, surfboards, and other things (and unusual for being a thornless Acacia). The seedlings were either one or two years old (I think the latter), and already a few feet tall. We started with 800 seedlings, and despite having only about half the number of people who'd signed up we managed to plant 765 of them over the course of about five hours. (And only stopped because we ran out of gas for the portable hole drillers and didn't have a means to manually dig holes!)

My first tree planted!

Interestingly, I learned that koa have “baby” and “mature” leaves, though the mature type are not true leaves, but actually phyllodes – enlarged and flattened petioles (the leaf “stalk”) which take on the function of leaves. The photo below shows one of a few koa that had been planted in the same location last year to test how well they would grow, and shows both types of leaves on the same plant.

A ~3 year-old sapling showing different leaf types.

The weather was also interesting, being clear and sunny throughout the morning before a cloud rolled in over lunch turning everything misty and foggy (which was pretty typical, I learned from people who'd been there for a lot of plantings). Last year's archaeology experience gave me a good idea of how to prepare, though being well above rather than below sea level meant the sun was completely unforgiving. (I missed a patch of sunscreen just below one eye, with the resulting sunburn Wednesday morning looking humorously like I had a black eye.)

Me with seedlings after lunch, to get an idea of the scale.

All in all it was a fun experience, though my knees are still sore a week later from all the up-down-up-down involved. I'd definitely like to go again (after some time to recuperate), though probably not very often as the days it happens are unfortunately mostly during the week (though this occasion was on Prince Kuhio Day, a holiday, so I'll keep an eye out for opportunities). It feels nice to be part of regrowing forests, and knowing that the trees I planted could potentially be seen by people driving by for decades or even centuries to come. We'll see what comes of it in future! A hui hou!

Checking out the aftermath of the 2022 Mauna Loa eruption

Earlier this month I got up before the Sun and drove up the Mauna Loa access road to where the lava crossed it in its eruption last year to try to get some drone photos. I originally tried back in March when the access road was first re-opened, only to have the wind blowing so hard when I arrived that I had to brace myself with every gust to keep from falling over. Needless to say, no drone flying happened that day!

This particular day, however, had almost perfect conditions, with a mere gentle breeze blowing and crystal clear skies overhead. I got to the end of the road within fifteen minutes of the Sun making an appearance in order to get those long early morning shadows for contrast, as various guides to photography suggest you should do. In retrospect, I'm not sure this worked in my favor in this particular case; with the Sun still low in the sky it meant serious lens flare if I took a photo looking anywhere close to the east, and the vast lava fields didn't really have much in the way of notable topography when seen from afar to make interesting shadows. Still, it was a good learning experience!

Cars for scale.

Here you can see the road, the flow covering it, and where it continues past the flow. There are actually two places the flow crossed the road, and this is the smaller of the two. I flew out along the road further to where the main overflow happened, and I could barely see to the other side of that one; I'd estimate it's at least three times wider.

Here's another shot from upslope, looking across to Maunakea. You can see how the flow really doesn't continue very far below the road there. Also this perspective (and the extreme low angle of Hawaiian shield volcanoes) makes this view a bit misleading: it looks like it's basically flat across to Maunakea, but in reality this point is over 2,500 feet (750 m) above the saddle between them!

While I was there, I tried flying my drone up the slope as far as I could, to see if I could crest the ridge and look over towards Kīlauea. DJI drones have a 500 meter (1,640 ft) limit on how high you can fly above your take-off point, which is specifically for flying up mountains, since legally you can't fly higher than 120 m/400 ft above the ground. I flew as far as I could, but even at 500 m above where I took off the ridge was still higher! At least there was this neat-looking puʻu near where I had to stop, so I took a photo of it (one case where I think the low angle of illumination helped).

Finally, with my last battery, I tried flying down the slope instead. Coincidentally, where the lava crossed the road turns out to be almost directly mauka (upslope) of NASA's “HI-SEAS Analog Habitat,” a small shelter where people come out and stay for months on end simulating missions to Mars. (Interestingly, I know from an article I saw that the place is equipped with the exact same hydroponic garden set-up that I have.) It wasn't too far to reach, and I was able to get the photo above. It's the white dome nestled next to the cool rift vent system in the foreground. (But I couldn't resist getting Maunakea and Haleakalā in the background too! I couldn't get much lower down as I'd have had to fly below my local horizon.)

Overall it was a pretty fun experience, and I'm glad I finally got around to making the trip again (and the dawn chill reminded me to be thankful for the balmy temperatures in Hilo!). I got some video footage too, so I'll have to see if there's enough interesting material to make a video out of. At some point I expect the road will be re-built over (or through) the flows to regain access to the Mauna Loa Observatories where I used to work, at which point I'll probably come up again to check it out. But for now this will serve as a snapshot in time of when the road was closed. A hui hou!

Drones, geology, and the tropical sun: a case study

On the slopes of Maunakea, a short distance east of the Visitor Information Station and Hale Pōhaku, a small pit crater (sometimes evocatively called “Bottomless Pit”) can be seen on satellite imagery.

I've circled it in this wider view of the area, it's not very big.

I thought for sure I'd mentioned it before on this blog, but a search failed to turn up anything. I find myself surprised at this, because I've been aware of this crater for over a decade now, and I've wondered how deep it goes for nearly as long.

You see, this crater is a bit unusual. There are many puʻu, or cinder cones, on Maunakea, and plenty of eruptive vents on Mauna Loa and Kīlauea. But from the ones I've seen up close, such eruptive vents are always filled in pretty close to the surface with hardened lava or choked with tumbled stone. This pit crater is unusual because, alone of all the craters I've seen on this island in Google Maps (and I've spent many hours looking), it has a dark hole at its center.

A closer view of the crater, with the hole clearly visible.

My first encounter with this crater actually came all the way back in 2012, which is how I know I must've discovered it within a few years of moving to the island. I don't remember the exact date, other than that it was on (or very close to) the night of a full Moon, and (for a few reasons) probably sometime during the summer.

I was working at the Visitor Information Station in 2012, and sometimes I'd have multi-day shifts, where I'd stay overnight in one of the rooms at Hale Pōhaku. I think I must've recently discovered the crater at the time, as I was very interested in hiking out to see it. I didn't have a car at the time, so while I could ride up to the VIS for work, I didn't have time during the day in which to visit the crater. (This recent discovery/fixation may help explain what follows.)

I'd just finished a day of work and gotten back to my room at around 11 PM, when I was struck with a crazy idea: why not hike the roughly half-mile distance out to see the crater? It was a full Moon, and there was plenty of light. (There were some light clouds steadily blowing west overhead, but not enough to seriously dim the moonlight.)  To my early 20s brain this made perfect sense; I was in pretty good shape, and could still miss an hour of sleep without feeling it too harshly the next day, so without telling anyone I was going for a nocturnal jaunt I grabbed my trusty headlamp and set off to the east.

In retrospect of course, going for a high-altitude hike at night to a geologic feature of unknown depth without telling anyone has Not A Good Idea written all over it. As mentioned, I think this must've been during the summer, as I remember the night being relatively mild, but it still wouldn't have been very fun to have been caught out overnight if I'd, say, sprained an ankle. And one thing I didn't know before setting out is that the ground between Hale Pōhaku and the crater is some of the best terrain I've ever seen for twisting an ankle, being mostly loose soil with fist-sized rocks that turn over at the touch of a feather (or at least a hiking boot).

Still, after half an hour or so of trudging over hill and dale (there's a ridge between Hale Pōhaku and the crater which isn't apparent on the map), I made it to my target, approaching from uphill (the northern side). As I crested the rim of the crater, I had an impression of it lying sprawled before and below me, and in its center, a yawning maw of inky blackness large enough to swallow a person. The full Moon overhead, the patchy clouds, the just-completed trek through silent shadowy solitary surroundings, and the anticipation I had for the event all combined to engender a feeling of solemn awe and make it a momentous, even portentous event.

I felt this feeling of awe for perhaps a full second, maybe even two, when a bird suddenly exploded out from where it was nesting not far from where I stood in a loud whirring of wings and squawk of alarm, giving me the fright of my life and nearly startling me over the edge of the crater as I reflexively jerked around.

I managed to retain my balance and not fall into the crater (thankfully, as will become apparent). I think, after recovering from the fright that hapless avian denizen gave me, I tried to take a few photos, but the light wasn't enough for them to come out. To make a long story short, after some more minutes admiring the awe-inspiring nighttime scene I headed back to bed with no one the wiser about my ill-advised midnight perambulation. And that was actually the last time I visited the crater for a full decade.

But even apart from it, all those years, I continued to wonder: just how deep did that pit go, which had left such an indelible impression upon my younger self? In those intervening years, I moved to Australia, got a PhD, and moved back to the island, and in between something new entered the pictures: drones.

While consumer-facing drones have been around since well before I moved to Australia in 2017, early models were cruder and less functional than the ones available today, and I wasn't really aware of their slowly improving capabilities. My vague impression was that they were mildly interesting toys, but not much more. (I also didn't exactly have the disposable income to buy one at the time, so I wasn't paying much attention.) Regardless of how accurate my assessment was at the time, it's true that drones have only continued to improve since, and in mid-2020, while stuck at home in lockdown in Melbourne, I started coming across videos on YouTube that opened my eyes to just what modern drones could do.

Enter another piece of information: Hawaii's location in the tropics. This fact means that, twice a year as the Earth progresses along its orbit, the Sun passes directly overhead. I don't remember when I first put two and two together, but at some point I had the thought that, at just the right time, the Sun would be directly overhead, casting its rays down the mouth of the pit…and that if I were to, say, be flying a drone over it at that time I could get an idea of just how deep the rabbit hole pit crater went.

Lāhaina noon (the modern name for when the Sun passes overhead) happens in May and July for Hawaiʻi island. (It happened last week, July 24th, in Hilo.) Last year I was excited to get my Mini 3 Pro in June, in time to catch the Sun in July. I even hiked out to the crater for the first time in a decade the week before Lāhaina noon to scope the area out, only to fall sick that week and be unable to head up Maunakea on the day itself. Still, I wasn't discouraged, and philosophically reasoned that a year's experience with drone flying would help me next time around. This year the May Lāhaina noon happened in the middle of the week, but the July one happened over the weekend of the 22nd/23rd, so I possessed my soul in patience and bided my time. I did get some pictures, though:

The crater July 2022, with the pit in the middle. A bit less spooky under the summer Sun.

This past Saturday, July 22nd, my chance had finally come: I headed up Maunakea with my Mini 3 Pro (and a friend), hiked out along a trail downhill from the crater, and as the Sun reached the zenith, I sent my drone skimming through the air towards the pit.

The crater July 2023, from the air. The hole's a bit bigger than a person, for scale.

And after a decade of wondering about this particularly intriguing geologic formation, I finally had my first glimpse at an answer regarding its depth! Everything, to my surprise, worked out perfectly: the Sun blazed away overhead, its light illuminating the pit, and to my surprise (and delight), it turned out to be significantly deeper than I'd been expecting.

Behold, the pit crater's floor, clearly visible.

A decade of wondering, years of imagining how this moment would go, and I can still hardly believe it went off without a hitch: I was able to clearly see and photograph the floor of the pit. A still photo doesn't show the parallax I saw while flying over it, but from that I would estimate that the bottom of that pit has to be on the order of 10 meters (~30 feet) down, or perhaps more. I took some videos of the effect, and I hope to make a slightly more rigorous estimate before too long, but I wanted to share this photo soon after fulfilling a multi-year dream of mine. (Yes, some people's dreams are inspiring stories of overcoming hardship or taking years to achieve something significant; mine pretty much boils down to, “I wonder how deep this hole goes?”)

It also deepens (pun not intended) the mystery of the hole's origin. There are plenty of cinder cones on Maunakea, especially around this part of the mountain, which are created from explosive eruptive events (which pulverize rock into cinder), but this isn't a typical cinder cone. Looking at satellite photos, the area nearby seems to show signs of a lava flow, and I've read that some of the last eruptions on Maunakea happened around this general area. Perhaps this particular vent was erupting more fluid lava rather than explosive cinders (which tend to fall back and fill in the vent)? That might explain the strangely smooth-looking floor (rather than a jumble of rocks as might be expected): maybe magma, after erupting, drained back in and we're seeing a frozen lava lake from the last lava to emerge from this vent? The area in the crater seems a bit sharp and jagged to have been erupting pāhoehoe, so perhaps it was ʻaʻā, or perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely. I'm not a geologist and I have no firm explanation for this unusual feature, I just know that of the many eruptive vents and cones I've seen around the island I don't know of another one like it.

A question answered, more questions raised; so it goes in science, and perhaps it's fitting that the pit retains some of its mystery even after being illuminated by the tropical sun. I've got some thoughts on how I might better estimate the depth of that floor, so look forward to seeing something about that when I find time and motivation to work it out some more. In the meantime, this is getting long so I'll leave it here. A hui hou!

A (belated) Christmas (Eve) crater

Last year on Christmas Eve I took a trip up Maunakea to check out something new. Well, “new” in the grand scheme of things; I wanted to see a young pit crater which appeared high on the flanks of Maunakea…back in 2015. I first heard about it the week before, however, and decided to check it out for myself since it's actually fairly substantial, perhaps about 40 m/150 ft across. It's also pretty high up, at around the 10,000 ft/3,000 m level, a bit higher than the Visitor Information Station. It's also in a region not open to hiking, so I had to get a little creative by flying my drone up the mountain side from a place where I could hike.

Anyway, here it is, the newest geological feature on Maunakea that I know of. In case you're wondering, this is not an eruptive crater; it's actually a collapse crater. From what I've heard, this could come about from an old, empty space (left over when magma drained away from past eruptions) slowly migrating upwards via successive ceiling collapse until it reached the surface, almost like a bubble moving upwards through liquid.

I was able to fly directly over and look down, and it's possible to make out the bottom, faintly. From looking at it while flying around I estimate it's maybe a bit deeper than it is wide (though it seems to widen out slightly below ground, possibly). In this photo you can better see that there's a fence around it, so clearly it's been known for a while and I'm late to the event, but I still think it's pretty cool to get to see something like this that's still so relatively new.

As an aside, reaching this by drone was an interesting experience. Drone regulations only allow flying up to 120 m/400 ft above ground level, but since this was up the side of the mountain I actually flew up to 500 m above my position vertically (the maximum permitted elevation of the DJI Mini 3 Pro) while flying up the slope. Luckily, that turned out be just high enough to reach the crater and get these photos, which were taken pretty close to that limit. It would've been cool to get a bit closer, but because I was flying from down on the ground I had to stay pretty high in the air or an intervening puʻu would block my signal (not just theoretically, I started losing signal strength several times during the flight by going too low).

I'll leave you with one more photo I took when I turned my drone around to fly back: the clouds were coming in at just that elevation, which is probably not a sight a lot of drone pilots get to see. Overall it was a fun experience, and a great demonstration of one of the reasons I wanted to get a drone: to better show off the amazing environment of this island by getting photos I otherwise couldn't. And should I hear of any other new (accessible) geologic features forming, I'll try to check them out as well*! A hui hou!

*The recent lava flow from Mauna Loa is still a bit too far away from open roads, unfortunately, I tried for that the day after Christmas. I did see in a news article that they're hoping to re-open the Mauna Loa Access Road in a few months once the lava covering it cools and they can re-build the road to the observatories.

A new tour of the Gemini telescope

On Friday I got to go on a tour of the Gemini telescope building at the summit of Maunakea. In pre-COVID-19 times this would be something all new employees would get at some (not-too-long) point after joining, but since tours haven't happened since early 2020 there were something like fifteen of us who'd joined in the last two years who went along. Gemini North is in shutdown at the moment for recoating the primary mirror (for the first time in nine years!), which afforded a very rare opportunity to see an 8 meter-class telescope without its mirror installed.

I actually went on a tour of Gemini (plus some other telescopes) a decade ago back in 2012 while I was an undergraduate at UH Hilo, so for comparison, here's a photo I took then of the telescope with mirror in place and instruments mounted on it:

It's hard to capture the telescope from within the dome because it's just so huge, but the blue-painted parts are the telescope structure, with the various boxy things beneath it being the instruments, which are bigger than refrigerators. The silvery struts above hold the secondary mirror, which can be seen near the top of the image. Now, compare this with the panorama I took on Friday:

The panorama distorts some of the angles slightly, but you can clearly see where the mirror goes inside the telescope structure in this image. The flap covering the aperture there is half of the mirror cover, which folds up accordion-style over the mirror when it's in place. The blue circular thing behind the telescope on the temporary scaffolding holds the mirror from beneath; here's a photo of it I took from from up on the platform running around the telescope:

Here you can see the actuators (the white disks) which sit beneath (or behind) the mirror and help change its shape as it deforms under its own gravity as the telescope changes its orientation. As a reminder, the primary mirror for both Gemini telescopes is 8.1 m (26.6 ft) in diameter, so this is a big piece of equipment. While I did get to see the mirror, it's down on the floor below this one where the mirror coating chamber is, and was hard to get a good photo of as it's on a stand with a cover on top. I did get a photo of the mirror-coating vacuum chamber itself, which is pretty neat:

This flying-saucer-looking thing is the mirror-coating chamber. It wasn't in operation while we were there, but we got to hear a bit about how it works. Unlike most of the mirrors on the mountain which use aluminum, Gemini's mirror is coated with silver, which gives it a better infrared reflectivity. Silver, however, is more chemically reactive than aluminum, and would tend to tarnish quickly over time. To help prevent this, the silver is deposited as part of a sequence of several thin layers of various metals (which I can't recall now unfortunately) to help keep it from tarnishing too quickly.

Overall it was a great experience where I learned a lot about the telescope, marred only by me forgetting my coat and spending the entire time rather chilly. (Thankfully a coworker lent me a jacket.) It's easy to forget just how humongous the various telescope enclosures on the mountain are until you're inside them, at which point the cavernous volume becomes somewhat awe-inspiring. We left Hilo at 8:30 in the morning and didn't get back until 5:30 in the afternoon, so it was a long and intense day due to the altitude, but it was definitely a really cool experience that I'm thankful I got to go on. Though next time, I plan to remember to bring my coat…

Secret Hawaiian waterfalls

One unexpected benefit of flying drones around Hilo and up the Hāmākua coast is discovering waterfalls. The Hāmākua coast, lying on the windward side of Maunakea in the path of the prevailing trade winds, has some of the highest average annual rainfall values of anywhere in the world. Lava from Maunakea is also not very porous (which isn't true of Mauna Loa, which has almost no rivers on it), leading to a multitude of streams and rivers (many of them year-round) making their way down its slopes to reach the sea. The nature of that lava and its stratified layers also tends to result in lots of waterfalls along the way.

Some of these waterfalls are pretty famous (and rightfully so), or known tourist attractions, such as Rainbow Falls on the Wailuku river which marks the line between Maunakea and Mauna Loa lavas, or Akaka Falls a bit up the coast from Hilo on the Kolekole Stream. But something I've learned from flying around is that there are a lot more waterfalls along the various waterways of the Hāmākua coast, and I've been delightfully surprised at some of the examples I've randomly stumbled across.

For instance, here's a rather striking rock formation I discovered while flying up the Wailuku river in a portion that isn't easily accessible. This is actually only about 200–300 feet downstream from Rainbow Falls, but it's just around a bend from the official lookout platform such that I'd never seen it before. In fact, I have no idea just how many people have ever seen this particular part of the river – for being so close to a tourist landmark it really is quite isolated and wouldn't be easy to access on foot. Maybe from the right bank, where as you can see there's a private farm, but I don't know if there's any specific viewing area. (I've yet to see what it looks like when the river is in full flood, but I'm eagerly awaiting a large rainstorm to find out!)

But while the waterfall on the Wailuku river is probably not familiar to many people, it's at least on the edge of Hilo with a possible way to reach it from one side, and (crazy) people do occasionally kayak on the river. The waterfall above is on an unnamed tributary of Kawainui Stream, which sits between it and Waiʻaʻama Stream in a wild and untouched part of the Hāmākua coast, just a little ways south of Akaka falls. I found it entirely by accident while I was filming a timelapse video flying down the flank of Maunaka towards Hilo; at the end of it I looked down, and found this gorgeous little double waterfall. I was able to find it on Google Maps, and given its location in a thickly-forested area between two streams to the north and south, there really can't be many people other than pilots who've ever laid eyes on it.

I hadn't expected to find these picturesque waterfalls when I started drone, but it's really cool to be able to find ones that likely haven't been seen by many people before me, and then share them with the world. There are lots of places on this island I'm still looking forward to taking my drone, but it's also fun to discover these unexpected surprises. I'm sure I'll have more to share in the future, too! A hui hou!

Volca-nomenclature in Hilo's roads

Hawaiʻi island is built (at least the portion of it above the ocean's surface) from five volcanoes: Kohala, Maunakea, Hualālai, Mauna Loa, and Kīlauea. Given the importance of these volcanoes to the people who live on the island, it's hardly surprising that some of Hilo's streets are named after them. There's no street named after Kohala that I can find, but the other four are all represented. What's interested me for some years, however, is the particular streets the names have been applied to.

Let's start with Maunakea and Mauna Loa; they're the two biggest volcanoes on the island and the only two directly visible from Hilo. The modern town lies mainly on lava flows from Mauna Loa, though a small part of it is located on Maunakea north of the Wailuku river (which flows along the boundary line between the two volcanoes). Given the prominence of these two volcanoes and the place of Maunakea in Hawaiian culture, you might expect their names to be attached to prominent streets in Hilo. So I find it somewhat amusing that the eponymous Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa Streets are both tiny alleys in a residential part of town, barely wider than one lane and quite short.

You can see all four streets in the image above, and just how short the first two are. Unless you live on those streets, you'll pretty much never have occasion to drive on them. (Though I have on occasion driven down the unlabeled street that passes through both of them.) Hualālai, though not visible over the Saddle between Maunakea and Mauna Loa, fares better with its eponymous two-lane road Hualalai Street. It's moderately longer, with a number of shops and services located along it, and I probably have occasion to drive at least part of it perhaps once or twice a month. (Not sure I've ever driven that little wiggly bit at the southwest end, though.) When I had to retake the driving test in May to get my driver license again after letting it lapse in Australia part of the route involved both Hualalai Street and Kilauea Avenue.

Speaking of which, the image above is actually incomplete, for the reason that Kilauea Avenue is actually several times longer than the other three volcanically-christened roads. Here's another picture which shows its full extent:

I'm not sure if Kilauea Avenue is the longest road in Hilo, but it's certainly up there. It's interesting to me that of the four volcanoes with streets named after them, Kīlauea gets by far the longest (and widest, going up to four lanes for perhaps a third of its length). While Hilo has no official "Main Street", I could make a decent case that Kilauea Avenue comes pretty close to filling the position. (Personally I probably drive on at least parts of it a few times a month, on average.) It's interesting because Kīlauea itself isn't visible from Hilo, and while it's one of the two most active volcanoes on the island, unlike Mauna Loa its eruptions pose no direct threat to Hilo.

Of course, it could also be chance and historical development. Hilo was much smaller in the past, after all, and it might be that when the streets were named they were closer in size and it wasn't obvious which might expand in the future. According to oral tradition, Hilo is the site of the first human settlement in the islands, with archaeology suggesting it's been continuously inhabited for around a thousand years at this point, so it's possible whoever named the roads expected Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa Streets to become bigger in the future.

I did a little looking around and found Old Maps Online, which…well, you can probably guess what it does from the name. Searching for Hilo led me to the map above, from 1917. It's jaw-dropping to me to see just how much smaller Hilo was a hundred years ago, but what I found interesting is that I'm pretty sure all four streets are on it. Hualalai Street is a bit shorter, but other than that it looks like all four were pretty much in their current locations already over a century ago. It's hard to gauge where Kilauea Avenue stops on this map, since there isn't a highway present for it to merge into and it seems to turn into a road between Hilo and settlements further uphill, but it tracks its modern course quite well from what I could see. Unfortunately there are no street names on this map, and I don't know when the names were officially assigned. But it looks like there's a good chance that whenever they were the streets probably weren't too different from their modern course.

Ultimately it's a minor factoid about Hilo, but it's one I've had in the back of my mind to share for literal years at this point. There may be more history-related posts in this vein to come; I've been getting more interested in local history recently and learning some interesting things (for instance, you may notice the presence of a railroad track on the map above which is not there in the present day). We'll see where it goes. A hui hou!

Experiments in AI-assisted art: DALL•E

You might have heard about DALL•E (a combination of Dali and WALL•E) sometime in the past year or so, a machine-learning AI system by a research team called OpenAI which can take a natural language prompt like “A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball” and produce an image based on it. It can mimic a huge range of styles from realistic photographs, to digital art, to hand-drawn sketches or paintings, and has produced some remarkable output. It got some coverage back around June when the team behind it started opening up access to a few people, who started sharing the images they were using it to create. I happened across the form to request access, and, intrigued, signed up, not expecting for a moment that I'd get it without entering a Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn profile. Near the end of July I saw an article that OpenAI had opened DALL•E up to a million people, and imagine my surprise when I got an email notifying me I'd been selected.

“A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball, realistic photo”, by DALL•E.

Above you can see one of the images I created with DALL•E. I was trying to explain it to someone as, “That new AI system where you put in a crazy phrase [at which point I tried to come with the craziest phrase I could think of] like, ‘A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball,’ and it spits out an image of it.” And then, well, I had to actually try it and see what I got. (DALL•E actually produces four variations every time you give it a prompt, which will look generally similar but have some differences in style, allowing you to choose the one you like best.)

“An Impressionistic painting of the Gemini Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea in the style of Vincent Van Gogh”, by DALL•E.

It certainly has some quirks. While the site encourages you to be descriptive and specific in the prompt you give, it's hardly perfect at interpreting what you mean. In the image above I asked for two very specific things (the Gemini Observatory and Maunakea), and while it's done a decent job of an image (I rather like the composition of this one) it's inexplicably given the observatory two domes instead of the single one it has in reality. (DALL•E was weirdly fixated on the notion that Gemini = two domes, as I tried several variations on this prompt and pretty much all of them had that feature.)

“A delicious-looking hamburger in the shape of a Rubik's cube, professional food photography”, by DALL•E.

One funny article I read recently had the author playing with phrases like “X in the shape of Y” in regards to food, which led me to try the prompt above. (Which, side note, looks scruptious and I would totally eat.) I find, in general, that DALL•E works best if you give it a fairly specific prompt about generic objects, though you can certainly include phrases like “in the style of X artist.”

There's been some hand-wringing online about whether DALL•E might lead to the death of various creative professions in the visual arts, like concept artists. Having played with it, I'm not too worried. Oh, sure, as it rolls out to wider use there'll probably be some changes, in the same way powerful new tools have always produced changes. There will probably be a lot of small jobs that might've been done by hand before that DALL•E will replace (stock photography, in particular, is something that DALL•E could fill in for quite well I think). But as my experiments with it showed, there are things I can see in my mind's eye which I can't figure out a prompt to produce with DALL•E, and if I want to show them to the world I still need to pick up a paintbrush or break out Blender or something to that effect. Sometimes something DALL•E puts out sparks something in my imagination, which is neat; I'm actually half-tempted to take my paints to the summit of Maunakea and attempt an Impressionist painting of the Gemini Observatory myself now. Ultimately we're just on the cusp of AI-generated images from natural language prompts (there are several other models around pursuing similar things), and we'll just have to wait and see where it takes us. I read about someone using DALL•E to produce a logo for a program they wrote, which I thought was a neat use of it.

For now, I'll keep throwing in the occasional crazy prompt I think of. While writing this post I had the thought that perhaps it would be useful for generating images for text-heavy posts where I don't have a photo or something else to break it up. I often find it surprising how well DALL•E can handle fairly abstract or abstruse concepts. We'll see how it goes, but you might start seeing more DALL•E images around here in the future. A hui hou!

Back to nā mauna!

It had to wait a few weeks since arriving back on the island for me to sort out various things, but I've finally been back to visit Mauna Loa and Maunakea! The first weekend after I got my car I went for a drive up to 11,000 feet on Mauna Loa where I used to operate the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array. I didn't stick around at elevation very long (since just by driving to the Saddle I was already higher than the entirety of the continent of Australia), but now that I have an all-wheel drive SUV I felt (a bit more) comfortable about exploring some of the side roads off the main, paved access road. One of them—which I'm pretty sure goes to the NASA experiment where they put people in a simulated Mars camp for months at a time—was closed off, but I got a pretty neat photo of my car with Maunakea in the background.

I thought the colors worked really well in this shot. You can just see Maui in the background.

Then, this past weekend I took my new AWD capability for a spin up to the summit of Maunakea. Now, I've been up there probably a few dozen times as part of my volunteering and later working at the Visitor Information Station, but I honestly can't remember if I ever drove up there or not (as part of the guided summit tours, that is; I certainly never took my two-wheel drive car up there). If nothing else, this was certainly the first time I drove up there in my own personal vehicle with no demands on my time, and I found myself loving it. I felt a strange joy welling up upon arriving at the top and driving around the familiar telescopes that left me positively giddy, though that might've been the altitude, it's hard to say.

It was a beautiful day while we were up there.

I took along some fellow new coworkers from Gemini who moved here about a month after I arrived and haven't yet experienced the sights. It turns out we got up there just in time, as a mere two days later the summit was covered in snow and ice, and we've had a blizzard warning for the past few days (apparently Hawaii has now received more snow this season than Denver). We spent a few hours up there hiking to the physical summit and staying to watch the sunset, then leaving immediately afterwards because the wind came up an hour or so earlier and it got cold.

I always love seeing the shadow of the mauna projected on the sky like this at dusk.

I'm really glad I was able to get back to my two favorite volcanoes, even if just for relatively brief periods of time. Expect to see more photos in the future as I continue to settle in and reacquaint myself with some of the places I enjoyed visiting before. (There are a number of fellow Gemini employees new to the island, so I've got excuses for organizing day trips and hikes!) Now that I've got a GoPro, one of the creative projects I've wanted to do for literal years—making timelapse videos of some of these amazing hikes and experiences—is finally within my grasp, or at least it will be whenever my desktop computer finally gets here for doing the editing. In the meantime, you get these photos, and I get to enjoy the experiences anew. A hui hou!