Personal Panoramic History, Part 4: 2011

In the previous post in this series we looked at a whole bunch of panoramas of Mauna Loa. In 2011, in contrast…okay, I can't lie, we'll see a few more panoramas of Mauna Loa. If ever there were mountains made for panoramic viewing, it's Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. But! We'll also see some new and unique vistas which for various reasons I haven't had the chance to recreate.

2011 was the year I finished college and graduated from UH Hilo, and thanks to all the volunteering I'd done at the Visitor Information Station I had a job lined up to start there in 2012. But for now, let's get on to the pictures…

January

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In January 2011 my housemate Jonathan and I decided it'd be cool to try to get some photos of the Sun rising out of the ocean from Hilo. It took us several trips to various locations around Hilo at the crack of dawn over the course of a few weeks to realize that the joke was on us: there are always clouds away off on the eastern horizon around Hawaiʻi. So we never did get the pictures of the Sun rising majestically out of the ocean like we wanted, but at least I got this first light panorama of Hilo Bay out of it (unintentionally, I only found and put these photos together while writing this post):

Mauna Kea over Hilo Bay. Coconut Island on the right.

This panorama from the morning of January 17th shows Mauna Kea, resplendent in the pre-dawn chill, with Hilo stretched out along the left side of the image and Coconut Island on the right. You can probably only see it if you already know what you're looking for, but you can see the breakwater that protects the bay stretching along the horizon behind Coconut Island on the right side of the picture. It looks like it may have been raining north of Hilo and further up the slopes of Mauna Kea that day.

February

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On February 22nd I hiked the summit trail of Mauna Kea (down) for the first (and so far only) time as part of a volunteer effort to pick up trash and keep the trail clean. (As before, you can follow that link and mouseover the panoramas in the post to see the original hand-made versions.) This allowed me to get a panorama of a rather different body of water:

Lake Waiau.

This is Lake Waiau, at an elevation of 13,020 feet (3970 m) making it one of the higher lakes in the world (though it depends strongly upon which list of lofty lakes you consult, as there's no official definition of what a lake is). I did originally have a picture of the right hand side of the lake (its north end, from this perspective), but somehow lost it in the process of transferring the photos from my camera to my computer all the way back when I made my first, manual version of this panorama. I have another panorama of this lake, but that's for a future post!

Mauna Loa, from part-way down the south slope of Mauna Kea.

And here's our first Mauna Loa panorama for the year, from somewhere down the trail. The summit area of Mauna Kea is so broad and flat that it can be hard to remember you're on top of a mountain sometimes, but as you descend you reach some (moderately) steeper bits that allow you look down and see the Saddle region spreading before you, with Mauna Loa in the distance. If you look closely you can even just make out Hualālai peeking over the hills on the right. This is definitely another one of my favorite panoramas I've taken.

June

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On the 12th of June I had the opportunity to hike to the actual summit of Mauna Kea, something I've only done three or four times over the years despite being in the general area more frequently. (It's not a long walk, it's perhaps ten minutes or so from the closest road, I just never usually had time when I was up there due to other duties.) Whenever I had the chance to do so, however, I'd always discover that I had either forgotten my camera, its batteries were dead, or the weather was so bad that I couldn't get pictures (it wouldn't be until January of 2012 that I got my first smart phone, and I had no way of getting photos off the phone I had before that).

Except this time. For once I'd remembered my camera, it still had battery power, and the weather, though not great, was good enough to get this panorama:

Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea summit.

This may be the only picture on this blog from Mauna Kea's summit, at the rarefied height of 13,796 feet (4,205 meters). This view stretches from looking east on the left down towards Mauna Loa to the south. As you can see the weather was not particularly great that day, with lots of cloud cover both around the slopes of the volcanoes and also much higher up. The cinder cone bowl seen in the foreground on the right of the image is Puʻu Wēkiu, wēkiu meaning “summit” in Hawaiian. The summit proper is simply the highest point in its rim.

I really wish I'd done a 360° panorama for this one. Oh well, future life goals I guess. Someday when the weather's better would make a better picture anyway.

July

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Come July I was once again back home in California visiting family, and my mom's family had a reunion up in Washington so we drove up through Oregon to attend. Along the way we stopped at some pretty nifty places, and I was able to get a few panoramas out of it (only one of which has shown up on this blog before).

One of the places we stopped was Crater Lake inside Mount Mazama, which is a fabulously cool place to visit. Despite visiting in July there was still plenty of snow piled high in places.

Crater Lake, with Phantom Ship visible.

This simple four-photo panorama comes from somewhere on the south-eastern side on the rim of the massive caldera that makes up the lake. Visible near the bottom-center is Phantom Ship, the smaller of the two islands in the lake. This and the next panorama were only created while writing this post, so they're new to me as well!

Crater Lake, this time with the much larger Wizard Island visible.

This panorama comes from the walkway heading towards the Visitor Center which provides an overlook of and lots of information about Crater Lake itself. In this shot the much larger Wizard Island near the western side of the lake is visible. The lake is 1,949 feet (594 meters) deep at its deepest point, yet Wizard Island still towers an additional 755 feet (230 meters) above its surface! It's a cinder cone formed in the caldera after the monumental eruption that dropped Mount Mazama's height by nearly a kilometer and created the original caldera.

Crater Lake with Wizard Island again, from the Visitor Center.

Finally, this panorama is one I've shown before, though this version was created with Hugin rather than by hand (you can compare the two by mousing over the image in the linked post). I really didn't write that much about Crater Lake when I visited it, which is a shame because it's a fascinating place. Especially after living in Hawaii for a few years and becoming acquainted with volcanoes.

For instance, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the US, the ninth deepest in the world, and has some of the clearest water of any natural bodies of water anywhere. And the scale is simply mind-blowing: Mount Mazama was estimated to be about 12,000 feet (3,200 meters) high before its fateful eruption; the highest point on the rim is now 8,159 feet (2,487 meters). A beautiful and poignant reminder of the raw energy of the natural world.

Another place we stopped after visiting the lake was the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Painted Hills Unit. (Hooray for taking pictures of signs so I know where it was!) These two panoramas were both two-photo accidental panoramas that I only discovered while writing this post.

Painted Hills, Oregon.

The landscape was truly spectacular. I wish I'd created more panoramas while I was there, as there was no shortage of subjects.

Oregonian bluff.

I'm not sure what this bluff is called (if anything), or where it is exactly—all I can tell is that we took a few group photos in front of it after I got this panorama and it appears to be near where we ate a picnic lunch. It's a great representative of the landscape in the area, though!

September

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September found me back in Hawaii, taking pictures of the same familiar subjects once again: more Mauna Loa panoramas! Seriously, I'll have to count how many different ones this single volcano's featured in when I finish this series…

Mauna Loa.

This panorama and the next are reminiscent of a similar one from 2009 seen in part 2 (though here the grass is brown and dry). Possibly an attempt to recreate it, as the 2009 version is one of my favorite panoramas I've taken. Don't look too closely at those fence wires, they kinda pop in and out of existence near the bottom of the image. I imagine close-in fine details like that are difficult for Hugin to deal with when there isn't enough photo coverage and the perspective changes rapidly.

Mauna Loa, again.

This panorama (from a zoomed-in perspective) is the Hugin version of a panorama I originally created manually whose existence led me to discover this forgotten post where I'd already shown off the manual version but forgotten to apply any tags. Don't look too closely at the barbed wire in this one either.

Mauna Loa, from just outside the Keck building.

This two-photo mini-panorama comes from outside the Keck building, though it doesn't show much other than Mauna Loa in the background and some of the so-called Sub-millimeter Valley where the telescopes sensitive to light with sub-millimeter wavelengths reside. You can see CSO in the middle, and some of JCMT on the right. Pretty sure this wasn't planned to be a panorama originally or I'd have taken photos with a wider coverage.

November

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On November 4th the University Astrophysics Club was able to get a tour of Gemini North, the InfraRed Telescope Facility, and UH Hilo's own Hōkū Keʻa telescope. This trip is the snowiest it's been up at the summit while I've been up there, which makes for some great images! The first two here I only created in the process of writing this post.

Snowy Mauna Kea summit, overlooking Submillimeter valley.

Another shot from outside Keck. (I'm not actually sure why, as I don't think a Keck tour was part of our itinerary—I don't have photos from inside it, anyway.) The snowfall must've been recent, but fairly light. (And judging by the distribution, must have come from the west, maybe? This is facing south towards Mauna Loa.)

Mauna Kea's snowy North Plateau.

This one's kinda interesting. It looks like it came from near IRTF, and is facing north over the North Plateau (where TMT, if it ever gets built, is slated to go). I don't usually take too many photos facing north like that, especially if the weather isn't clear and Maui isn't visible.

From a few weeks later (November 27th, to be precise) comes this panorama of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Though it may not look it, this one is actually from a (slightly) different location to the others that have shown up so far. On the left of the image, between the peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, you can see the peak of Puʻu Kelepeamoa, where several of these panoramas have been from. That peak, however, is merely the highest point in the rim of a giant cinder cone just below the Visitor Information Station (so large, in fact, that the Access Road runs through it). This panorama was taken from the second-highest point in the rim, on its eastern side. (Puʻu Kalepeamoa is on the west.)

In the original hand-made version of this panorama (visible at the link above) I put Mauna Loa on the right of Mauna Kea (possible as it's one of my rare full 360° panoramas), but I think this composition works a lot better.

December

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In December of 2011 I graduated from UH Hilo (or technically, I participated in the ceremony, a slight miscalculation with paperwork meant that I didn't officially graduate until next semester). Also my family came out to visit for the first time! We did some sightseeing while everyone was there, and I have a lot of photos, but I could only find a single accidental panorama, from a botanical garden we visited a ways up the coast north of Hilo:

Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, looking out onto Onomea Bay. Don't look too closely at the middle palm tree.

And that's it for 2011! A pretty good year for panoramas, all told. The next post's going to be pretty short as I really didn't take too many panoramas in 2012, not even accidental ones to be discovered after the fact. There're a few good ones, though, and starting in 2012 there'll be ones taken with a phone camera—they're pretty awful at first, so it'll be interesting to watch them improve over the years. A hui hou!

More Pictures from the Mountain

It's not a particularly creative post title, but at least it's accurate. Have some more pictures from Mauna Loa!

After several tries, I've come to the regretful conclusion that it's simply impossible to replicate the colors seen in the sunsets up here in a photo. They're just so incredibly breathtaking in the range of hues.

That being said, this picture comes pretty decently close. (This is the view from just outside our break room.)

May 1st we had a snowfall on the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. This is pretty late in the season for snow, though it's possible to get snow any time of the year here; I still remember the time it snowed all the way down to the Visitor Center while I was working there—in June! (This snow doesn't extend that far down.) At a little over 11,000 feet (~3,350 meters) our site was too low to get any snow, though.

I like how the snow here is mostly only in one sector, not equally spread around the summit.

A few days later, on May 5th, the snow had all melted, but the focus is this old eruptive vent near the road—we stopped on the way down after some daytime observations. This is maybe fifty feet from the road, and perhaps twenty feet deep. I couldn't get a good picture of the inside because it's so large, perhaps thirty feet across.

I don't know how old it is—based on the weathering I'd guess somewhere within the past few hundred years—but it's incredible to imagine when this fissure was belching molten rock and gasses from the interior of the earth.

There are also several lava tubes visible beside the road up to the site. This is the largest and most visible, though it doesn't go anywhere on either side beyond where it collapsed here. You can see where the road goes maybe twenty feet beyond the far end. This is not the gaping hole closest to the road—just above the 9,000 foot marker is the opening to a small lava tube literally within two feet of the side of the road, though I forgot to take a picture of it. I'm hoping to take a weekend soon to explore some of these lava tubes, so hopefully I'll have more pictures soon. A hui hou!

Christmas Snow, in Hawaii!

This weekend we had a winter storm, with a strong, steady rain of a kind unusual in Hilo falling from about midnight Saturday till evening Sunday. It made the annual Messiah sing-a-long I attended Sunday an interesting experience in trying to sing over the rain pelting the roof, but it also left behind a nice gift: a beautiful coating of snow on Mauna Kea that I was able to see this morning.

An hour later the clouds had closed in again, so I'm glad I was able to catch this when I did. A hui hou!

Snow Chains and Volunteering

Though thankfully unrelated.

Last Friday I had some Snow Chain Installation Training, which was interesting because I've never installed snow chains before, never having lived any place where they would actually be necessary. Having said that, I was under the impression that it involved driving the vehicle to be snow-chained over and onto the chains with which to snow-chain said vehicle. However, the chains we have (at least for some of the vehicles) are a different design that simply engulfs the wheel like a hungry starfish engulfing a tasty bivalve. No driving involved, other than simply driving off afterwards with snow chains attached.

All of it which underscored by the fact that I have no official reasons to go up to the summit in an official vehicle as part of my job at the moment, and would be extremely unlikely to do so on a day which was snowy enough to require chains if I ever did. But at least it was interesting.

Also, tonight I went up and volunteered at the Visitor Information Station for the first time since I've been back. I could tell I needed to build up my high-altitude tolerance again! It was a beautifully clear night, though the biting wind drove most people away after a few hours (I also need to build up my cold tolerance again). An enjoyable evening altogether, though, and I got a chance to catch up on what the sky's been doing the last few months (which is hard to do with all the clouds in Hilo). I'm hoping to get back into the astrophotography scene soon as well. Anyway, I should get to bed to be ready for work tomorrow. A hui hou!

Mauna Kea Snow.

This week while working up at the Vis on Mauna Kea, I was called in early Tuesday morning (about 7:30) because the road to the summit needed to be closed to visitors. At that point, although there was a large mass of clouds off to the east, the weather was actually pretty nice, not raining or blowing, blue sky off to the east, not overly cold for the altitude and time of day. Fifteen minutes later, it was snowing pretty good. Since I can count the number of times I've experienced snow falling from the sky on two hands, this was a pretty big experience for me. (Thankfully I was sitting inside an idling vehicle blocking the summit road, not actually out in the snow.)

Getting snow down at the level of the Visitor Information Station, at 9,200 feet, is really quite rare. It snowed for perhaps 20 to 30 minutes before turning to a frigid rain that lasted the entire remainder of the day without pause. The snow all melted up to maybe 11,000 feet within 3 hours, but it was real pretty while it lasted. I even managed to get some pictures of it:

Looking up the summit access road, from my vantage point parked half across it.

More of the mountain slope above the Hale Pōhaku area.

I must say, snow's not so bad when sea level and warmth is just 45 minutes' drive away. I certainly wouldn't want to live with the stuff for any appreciable length of time, though.

Telescopes and Snow

This past Thursday my Observational Astronomy class got to go on a field trip to Mauna Kea, where we were treated to tours of three of the observatories up there: the Gemini North facility, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, and Hōkū Kea, the telescope that will eventually be for undergraduate students at UH Hilo when they finish fixing it.

We've had quite the storm system washing over the island this past week, so there was actually snow on Mauna Kea when we went up -- and not just "small piles in places the sun hasn't melted yet", but "a pretty good covering". Since I could probably count the number of times I've been around snow on my fingers and toes, it was pretty impressive to me.

Puʻu Hau Kea (Cinder Cone of White Snow)

Looking back whence we came.

Puʻu Makanaka (the large one. I don't know what Makanaka means, perhaps a proper name)

From left to right: Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, Gemini North, the UH 88-inch, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, and Hōkū Kea. All looking very cold.

Part of the Sub-Millimeter Array, standing staunchly amidst the cold.

Having gotten all those distracting pictures of frozen water out of the way, I can proceed to describe the actual objects of our tour. Our first stop was the Gemini North telescope, one of two identical 8.1-meter (that's 27 feet) telescopes built and operated by a consortium of countries. The other, Gemini south, resides in Chili, so that between them the two observatories cover almost the entire night sky. The two domes are identical, and are an imposing sight close up:

The Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope dome, up close.

It's hard to capture the sheer size of a telescope that has more area than the floor of my room in one shot, but I tried. The Gemini telescope is similar in many ways to the Subaru telescope, which is almost the same size. For some reason, they're even painted suspiciously similar shades of blue. I did my best here:

The Gemini North telescope. It is huge.

Since it can be hard to appreciate something when you have nothing mentally to compare it to, have another shot with some crew members working in it (that big box they're standing around is an instrument they're about to put on telescope, and yes, it's so big that they're standing on it):

Removing one instrument and swapping in another.

From Gemini we moved to the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, a 3-meter (9.8 feet) telescope built exclusively for infrared viewing (many of the optical telescopes on Mauna Kea such as the Keck twins, Gemini, Subaru, etc. have the capability to do some limited infrared observing, but IRTF is one of the two telescopes built exclusively for it). IRTF was originally built to support the Voyager missions and to this day at least half of its observing time is taken up by planetary research. Because of this it has a somewhat unusual mount called an English yoke equatorial mount. It's something like two tuning fork stuck with their open ends together, with the telescope free to rotate in between. The advantage of this design is that it is much easier to observer objects that are very near the zenith than would be possible on a regular alt-az mount such as most of the large telescopes on Mauna Kea have.

The NASA Infrared Telescope. Note that same shade of blue paint at the bottom.

Here's another shot from below showing the telescope nestled between the two arms of its yoke:

Showing off the telescope's unusual mount design.

Finally, we ended our time on the summit with a brief tour of Hōkū Kea. It's a mere 0.9 meters, and the entire dome area is probably smaller than Gemini's mirror. It's also apart for maintenance at the moment with the mirror being down for some work, so I didn't get any interesting pictures. There wasn't much to see besides the empty tube, although it too was painted that same shade of blue. I actually asked people at each telescope if there was a reason for the color, but all I got were blank stares so I still don't know. Maybe it was just cheap.

Anyway, after our frosty tour we left to return to the warmth of Hilo, but not before I captured one more snowy landscape in memory:

Looking to the south-west, Hualālai is visible off in the distance through the clouds.

Addendum: If you've read this far you must like pictures, so you may like to check out the post directly before this one. I re-reduced my Andromeda Galaxy picture, and I think it came out a lot nicer. I added it to the post, so you can see both of them and compare. A hui hou!

Just Playin’ in the Snow

Today's blog is more of a whimsical illustrated adventure, with photographs instead of illustrations. Saturday I went on a summit tour up to Mauna Kea, and there was still some snow left unmelted. Since I could probably count the number of times I've played in the snow on both hands and feet (demonstration of that fact: I learned it's a really bad idea to handle snow on the summit of Mauna Kea without some form of gloves on your hands), I proceeded to take a little time right before heading down to make a tiny snowman!

Tah-dah!

I was carrying him with me down the mountain in the tour vehicle, when I saw someone else had left another, slightly larger snowman near one of the buildings, and I realized what I should do with my creation. I didn't have much time because we needed to get down for dinner, so I took off running to pad my snowman with a little more snow and place him before I had to go. I didn't realize the guide had grabbed my camera and started snapping away...

Snowman placement is serious business!

“Why hello there, lonely snowman! Care for a companion?”

“There you go, little snowman!”

That's when I realized I was on camera.
 Hey look, it's Maui in the background on the left!