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!

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!

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!

High surf days in Hilo

In February of last year, I don't think I saw the Sun for the entire month. This year has had nicer weather in comparison, but where last winter saw us receiving torrential rain, this year's theme has been “high winds.” I'm not sure of the exact number, but we've lost probably in the range of a week or two of observing nights due to winds exceeding 50 mph on the summit over the course of January and February to date. While the winds don't get that high in Hilo (outside of hurricanes), they've definitely been noticeably stronger on numerous days this past month.

One effect of that has been a lot of high surf warnings, and that led me on the 2nd to fly my drone out to the Hilo bay breakwater to capture the waves rolling over it majestically one late afternoon. Serendipitously, a hole in the clouds opened to the west, letting the Sun shine in a bit and cast an unusual illumination over the scene. But enough talk, here's the video!

Normally the bay is much more placid (and ‘pacific’), so it's both a shock and a treat to see the waves crashing over the breakwater like that. There's just something about that motion, and the rippling of the sea's surface in general, that I find mesmerizing. Anyway, hope you enjoy the video! A hui hou!

An Arizona trip highlights video

I'm in the middle of a two-week vacation, which has provided me some much-needed time to rest and recuperate. I can tell I really needed this time off; normally, after two days of rest I've recovered my creative spark, but this time it's taken nearly five days to start to feel like doing much of anything. I say this by way of explanation for why updates have been so sparse around here, and hopefully I'll be able to get around to a few of the many projects I've got tucked away in my brain in the remainder of the year.

For this post, have a little video with some drone footage from my trip to Arizona. I took a motley collection of clips from a variety of locations, and have interwoven them in what seemed like an interesting fashion.

One location that shows up a few times is Cochise Stronghold (named for a famous Apache chieftain who held out and was eventually buried in the area). It's a large rock formation in the Dragoon Mountains, with a hiking path going up to it.

Cochise Stronghold (taken from the air with my Mini 3 Pro).

Another thing which shows up in the video a few times is the migration stop (or overwintering site, I'm not sure which) for sandhill cranes. As seen, there were a lot of them there; they're quite common and not endangered (estimated population in North America in the hundreds of thousands), and didn't seem to be all that bothered by my drone beyond a little unease, so I felt comfortable flying fairly close. It was incredible seeing what must've been thousands together like that; we don't really see anything like that here in Hawaii (or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places!).

A tiny fraction of the sandhill cranes present. They're fairly large birds, think “flamingo-sized.”

Also appearing a few times is the town of Pearce where I stayed. It's intertwined with a golf course built around half a century ago, which ultimately didn't prove successful. (I can only imagine the water bill to keep it green during the summer!) The holes meandered about through the town, and traces of them can still be seen all over the place, including the water hazard now being used as a reservoir for the vineyard seen at about 1:20 in the video.

Anyway, that's all for this post. I still have a few locations where I took enough photos to get another post or two out, but I wanted to get this video out to show off some of the bits and bobs of footage I got. A hui hou!

A new drone!

So this post is actually several months late, for reasons I'll explain shortly. You see, back in May I got a new drone: the DJI Avata. I got it right before taking a trip to visit my family in California, and was excited to start sharing footage from it. One small problem: the video editor I use (KDEnlive) crashed every time I imported a clip into it. Not clips from my Mini 3 Pro, or GoPro 9, mind you, only the Avata.

I considered trying a different editor – maybe learning how to use Blender for video editing – but I'm busy, and lazy, and didn't get around to it. Fortunately, when I upgraded my computer from Debian 11 to 12 last month, something in amongst all the upgrades seems to have fixed the problem, allowing me to continue using what I know to make videos with Avata footage. Huzzah! And now that I can, have not just one, but two new videos!

Before that, though, a quick digression on types of drones, of which there are essentially two nowadays. They don't exactly have defined names (and all categories are blurry to some extent), but I've seen the name “flying cameras” to describe drones like my first one, the Mini 3 Pro. These are drones which are meant (generally speaking) for eye-in-the-sky photos or smooth cinematic video clips, up in air away from obstacles, since they're generally pretty delicate and a collision with almost anything will knock them out of the sky due to their unprotected propellers.

The other type is first-person view drones (or FPV). FPV drones project their camera feed directly on a headset instead of a controller, giving a pilot a more immersive experience which makes it somewhat easier to judge a drone's position and distance from obstacles. FPV drones generally focus on video rather than photos, and often from much closer to objects than the other type of drone. They're generally pretty hearty and damage resistant, and some (like the Avata) have propeller guards, allowing them to fly in close proximity to people and even potentially bounce off obstacles without getting knocked out of the air. (Though there are also ones without propeller guards.)

Since the Avata is so tough (as plenty of reviews on YouTube will attest), I wasn't too worried about letting my family fly it. There were some crashes, as expected (the Avata is good at getting you to take risks while flying it), and I thought splicing some of the resulting footage together could make for an amusing video. In this video, all the footage is from when my two brothers were flying (but while the crashing is amusing, lest you think they're terrible pilots I also included some non-crash footage to balance it out).

And to reassure that my drone is, indeed, still fine after those crashes, I have a second video. The footage for this was taken just a few weeks ago after discovering I could use it in my editor. This video was taken at Waiale Falls on the Wailuku river, not too far from where I live. The river's pretty low right now, so I thought I'd try flying up and down over the falls.

I wasn't originally planning to make a video out of this footage (hence why it's two clips put together rather than one long one), as my original motivation for taking it was trying out Gyroflow. Gyroflow is a program which can take GPS data embedded in a video file to stabilize it after it was taken, and a lot of people swear by it for video stabilization. It requires turning off any electronic image stabilization (such as I had on in the first video), and running the footage through Gyroflow after taking it, but I was impressed enough with the results that I decided to turn a few clips into the video above, and I can see why people speak so highly of it.

Anyway, I hope to be able to make and share some new types of videos with my Avata in future! One drawback it does have is that it's seriously loud. That's just par for the course for FPV drones since they need a lot of power, but it's not helped by the fact that it generally gets better footage when flown closer to the ground rather than up in the sky like my Mini 3 Pro. I dislike flying it around people, but it's a big island, so I'm sure I can find some nice secluded places to go flying.

And finally, while I know I've picked up two drones in less than a year since I started flying, I don't have plans to amass a large fleet or anything. I've got a representative of each of the two main categories of drone now, and while it's possible I might upgrade to newer models in future, they're both quite capable enough already that I don't see a big need to do so for a while. A hui hou!

Fun with drones in the California countryside

Back in May I took a short trip over Memorial Day weekend to visit family back in California. This was the first time I'd been back since I starting drone flying last July, so I was looking forward to seeing some familiar places from the air. My brother Joel also has a drone (in fact he started flying before I did), so together with my other brother Jonathan we had some fun going drone flying together. After a session out in the countryside, as we were getting ready to come home I had the idea of following our car from the air (while driving slowly, on a deserted country road, with multiple people for extra situational awareness).

I've never operated from a moving vehicle before, and it was a fun experience practicing my cinematic moves trying to track the car while also riding in it. The full video was a bit too long to be interesting, but I extracted a few nice shots and put them together into the shorter version below. I'm especially proud of the bit near the end where, as we went under I-505, I managed to transition on the fly (literally!) from following mostly behind the car to instead tracking it from straight above. (I even left the ugly jerky animation bits in there which I've cut out from the rest of the video, just to show how it worked.)

Anyway, just a calm video of a relaxing drive through the countryside. (I've left out the parts where I almost ran into power lines…twice. It was fine.) And thanks to some recent system updates, I might have something new in a similar vein to show off pretty soon. A hui hou!

It's not just rivers of *lava* in Hawaii

It's been rainy and overcast most of the past few weeks, but this past weekend especially we've been going through a significant storm here in the islands. Apparently Hilo got over 11 inches/ 26.5 cm of rain on Saturday, and while that was the most in a single day we also got plenty both before and after. It's episodic rather than steady rain, however, so on Monday I took advantage of a break in the rain to see what Waiale Falls looked like with this much water.

The answer turned out to be “phenomenal.” I saw it as I crossed the bridge to park, but the falls' true fury stuck me as I walked back onto the bridge for a better look. A torrent of water poured over the falls, roiling and churning a foamy brown as it passed beneath the bridge under my feet. A ponderous roar filled my ears, and I had to shade my eyes against a cloud of mists fitfully blowing over me from the direction of the falls. It felt like the ground itself was shaking beneath the cascade of water rushing towards the sea (and not just while I was standing on the bridge!).

Waiale Falls, Wailuku River. A flow rate of ~1000 cubic feet per second.

Quickly moving out of the billowing spray, I got my drone in the air and surveyed the river from above. The sight of the churning waves of water was mesmerizing, but, not knowing how long I had before the rain returned, I took a few photos and got a video flying up the river. A good thing, too, as I can't have been in the air for more than ten minutes before I felt the first drops of returning rain and had to quickly land.

With the footage in hand, I looked back through my files and found a similar video I'd taken all the way back in June when I first got my drone, when the river was running near its lowest ebb. I've wanted to be able to compare the river between low and high flow states for months now, so I put together the following video showing the dramatic difference. The name Wailuku comes from “wai,” meaning “water,” and “luku,” meaning “destruction,” and while you might wonder about the name seeing the river when it's low, this video should amply demonstrate where it comes from.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the video, and if you get the chance, definitely check out the Wailuku (from a safe distance!) while it's full. It's quite the unforgettable experience. A hui hou!

A Christmas volcano visit for 2022

Merry Christmas everyone! I finally got around to editing together a video from drone footage I got back on November 29 when I went up to see Mauna Loa's eruption on its second full day. I flew from Puʻu Huluhulu out towards where the lava was flowing, but it was still so far away at that point that even at the limit of my signal range it didn't look all that impressive on my controller screen. Which is a shame, because it meant I didn't bother taking that much video at the closest point, whereas it actually looks fairly neat when blown up to a larger size; a good lesson to learn for the future, I suppose.

One other very cool event occurred along the way, however, which I really wanted to include in a video and is a good part of why I eventually made this one. I left the camera recording while flying out toward the lava flow, and perhaps halfway there a flock of birds appeared out of nowhere, flying and diving around and in front of my drone. I almost had a heart attack as my first thought was that they they might attack the drone, but they simply flew along with it for around half a minute before diving out of sight. I'm not sure why they decided to fly along, as I was deliberately flying nearly at my height ceiling to avoid disturbing any wildlife that might be on the ground; maybe they were just passing by and decided to follow along for fun? You can watch the video and judge for yourself:

Just to be clear, while a no-fly zone was put in place over the eruption area the next day, to the best of my knowledge this was still an acceptable flight when I did it. It's a bit disappointing to me that there wasn't any flying allowed for the rest of the eruption, but I guess the lesson to be learned is to jump on the next one quickly. Anyway, that's my Christmas present to all of you this year. I may have some more mauna*-related drone photos/videos in the not-too-distant future, but we'll see how things play out. Mele Kalikimaka, a hui hou!

*Loa and kea.

Watch a cruise ship leave Hilo Bay

One of the places I've been flying my new Mini 3 Pro is a scenic lookout point along the coast just north of downtown Hilo, along the Hāmākua highway. From there you can get a good view out over Hilo Bay, as it's just across from the end of the breakwater protecting the harbor. It's pretty much the closest place I can go to fly over the ocean due to the proximity of the airport to the bay beaches, and as once I got over my worry that my drone was going to randomly plummet from the sky into the ocean, I discovered that flying over open water is pretty great because of the lack of obstacles or changes in ground height to have to pay attention to.

Coincidentally, the first time I went was on a Tuesday, which is the day each week when a cruise ship visits Hilo from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM. I got there just after the cruise ship had left the bay and was heading out into the ocean, and decided that it would be an interesting challenge trying to film it in the process of exiting the bay. The next week I went, the weather was bad, with spitting rain not long before the ship passed by and threatening overcast skies; I was also caught off guard by just how fast it could move, so I barely managed to get my drone in the air fast enough to catch it, and only got a few photos (which weren't great due to the lighting conditions).

With the days starting to shorten again after the summer solstice, I tried again this week, and this time the weather cooperated and I was ready (just). I could tell that my confidence was much improved even from just the week before, as I quickly got my drone into the air and sent it whizzing off over the waves.

But rather than continue to tell you about it, I'll just show you! I got enough footage to put together a short video, and here it is:

That ship was really moving, mind you; all but the very last shot in that video is from a single nine-minute take, and that includes the time getting to and from the boat at the beginning and end. The time the ship took to get out of the harbor once it lined up was no more than about three minutes, which is part of why I wasn't prepared for it the week before. All that movement made it a really interesting target to try to match velocity with and get some cinematic shots of, though, especially since I didn't have to worry about hitting anything else while flying.

As I was editing the video I realized it's been a little over a year since my last one (from before I left Australia), and it felt great to get back into editing again. Hopefully this will be merely the first of many to come! A hui hou!

Lunar eclipse of May 26, 2021

Thursday night we had a total lunar eclipse which turned out, quite surprisingly after a cloudy day, to be visible for most of its duration in the early evening. I'd been expecting to be clouded out so I had to scramble a bit, but I managed to set up my GoPro and take a video of nearly the entirety of the central, umbral portion. Taking an exposure every ten seconds for three hours got me thirty-six seconds of footage, which I've put into the video below (with a little zoom in afterwards on the Moon during totality).

I continue to be impressed at how good the quality of night footage a GoPro HERO 9 can get, especially with its comparatively minuscule aperture. While the full Moon is wildly overexposed at the beginning and end of the eclipse (which is to be expected with how bright it is), it actually works out pretty well during totality when it's darkest. I was amazed that you could even glimpse the dust lanes of the Milky Way at that point—I went out to look at it around then, and I definitely couldn't see a trace of them by eye. I'm glad I got the chance to try filming it, and thankfully the clouds only came in after totality and didn't block the main event. As the center of the Milky Way rises higher overhead in the weeks to come, I might try filming it around a new Moon if I get another clear night like tonight to see how well it comes out. Depends on the weather, of course, so we'll see! A hui hou!

Birds of Melbourne: rainbow lorikeets

I've finally gotten around to editing some footage I shot in January of some rainbow lorikeets feeding. If you thought the crimson rosellas were gorgeous, take a look at these beauties! You might even be familiar with them already from advertising; I feel like they're the go-to birds to display whenever TV makers want to tout their latest screens. They do make a fantastic test of color ability with those rainbow hues, to be fair!

I see these around once or twice a week on average, so they're relatively common. As you can hear in the video, they're quite vocal little parrots, almost constantly chirruping and squawking quietly. But of course, what you're going to mainly notice is that jaw-dropping plumage, going from deep blue or purple, to lighter blue, to bright green, then through yellow, orange, and even a deep reddish-orange hue. (Fun fact: I made the gradient in the words “Rainbow lorikeets” in the video thumbnail by sampling from different parts of the bird in the image, with some slight tweaks.)

I think that's all the footage of birds feeding I've recorded so far; I really need to get around to trying out that motion-sensing setup idea I had now that GoPro's come out with the GoPro Labs firmware for the Hero 9, which allows you to, say, only record while a (user-settable) level of motion is detected. I've tried it out once or twice but still need to play with it to find a good level of motion detection for feeding birds (and of course, have some interesting birds come by while I'm filming!). We'll have to see how that goes in the future. A hui hou!

Birds of Melbourne: Australian magpie

I'm back with another bird-feeding video, this time starring an inquisitive Australian magpie. Unlike their Eurasian counterparts, which are corvids (birds like crows and ravens), Australian magpies are passerine birds (perching birds, or songbirds). They also have a reputation as one of the most feared birds in Australia, due to a tiny fraction getting territorial around mating season and dive-bombing people traveling past their nests. (Especially bikers, for some reason; if you see an Australian biker with zip-ties or pipe-cleaners poking out of their helmet, that's an anti-magpie strategy.)

I've never had a magpie swoop me (just noisy miners), but they're undoubtedly quite confident birds that will often betray no concern as you walk by mere feet away. I've seen them come over to almost within arm's reach when I've offered food. They've also got some amazing vocalizations; my favorite (and their most famous) is a sort of warbling call with some fascinating harmonics, though apparently they can also imitate dozens of other bird species and even natural sounds or human speech!

For the video below, I found a magpie outside and put out a cluster of seeds for it, then set up my camera a few feet away on a short tripod to get a ground-level view. (Magpies spend quite a lot of time walking around on the ground looking for food.) I took a seat just behind the camera, so I was quite surprised when, after about a minutes of pecking at the seeds, the magpie came over and starting checking out the camera! It was pretty neat, and I got some great footage out of it.

Despite their fearsome reputation and visage, magpies can be surprisingly playful. I've seen one rolling over on its back in the grass (and heard of such behavior from other people), and apparently they've been seen doing things like having one magpie hang on to a hanging towel upside down, and get swung back and forth by other individuals. Pretty fun-loving birds, all things considered! A hui hou!

Edit (2/16/21): I've just come across the following video of Australian magpies playing (from the YouTube channel "The Magpie Whisperer"), and had to share—it's really funny to watch them doing summersaults and just clearly having a grand old time. You can also hear some of their wonderful warbling song.

And here's another clip of some juvenile magpies hanging upside from towels on the line. Such funny birds!

Birds of Melbourne: Crimson Rosella

Now that I've got a GoPro I'm constantly on the lookout for new and different things to film, and recently had the idea of trying to catch some of the neat birds that are present this far out in the suburbs of Melbourne. I was surprised at just how many species of parrots are found in Australia when I first moved here—I can think of at least four widely different ones I see around here on timescales from every few days to every few weeks. Anyway, I started putting out some birdseed, and last week I got lucky when a crimson rosella showed up to eat just a few minutes after I set up my camera. Crimson rosellas are native to the southern and eastern parts of Australia, and have a striking red-and-blue-and-black coloration. You can see (and hear) a few of them in action in the video below:

I think in future videos I'll try to stick to a more consistent field of view and resolution; I was experimenting changing between different ones, which made the final video a bit disjointed. I'm definitely still learning as I go, but it's great to be able to capture such high-quality video so easily. I've been a bit doubtful of the usefulness of shooting in 4k resolution when I only have a 1080p monitor and it chews up so much memory space, but I tried shooting some of the central segments of the video in 4k and even when downscaled to 1080p resolution it retains so much more detail. I'll definitely be experimenting more with it in future, maybe even start releasing videos in 4k? We'll see! I can't exactly promise more videos like this because it depends on the birds and luck, but I'd really like to do more, showing off more of the cool bird species around here. A hui hou!

Edit (1/26/21): There's a bird which I identified as a “myna” which flies by in the video, and I have recently discovered to my chagrin that I have misidentified it: it's actually a noisy miner. There are common mynas in Australia (an introduced pest), and they look fairly similar at first glance, but I've seen enough noisy miners around where I live to tell them apart now.

Christmas Planets, 2020

Merry Christmas everyone! I've got a Christmas video for you this year. I'd been hoping to see the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn this year, with their closest approach for over 800 years on December 21st, but Melbourne's weather took a turn for the cloudy for more than a week around that date. However, I noticed Christmas evening that the clouds were finally starting to clear out, so on a whim I set up my GoPro to get a timelapse, and caught not just Jupiter and Saturn but Mars and the Moon too. The two gas giants are a bit hard to see in the video, but were clearly visible to the naked eye when I came out to look when it got dark. They're already pulling apart again, but at least I got to see them so soon after closest approach. Hope your Christmases everywhere were as merry as can be this year! A hui hou!

A Typical Melbournian Hailstorm

So if you've followed this blog for a while you may know that I enjoy making videos, and have been doing so for a few years now. And while cell phones are a great portable video-taking device (seeing as all my previous videos were taken using them), some of the kinds of things I really want to do (such as long timelapse videos) aren't really suited for being taken by them (not that that's stopped me before). I've thus been interested in getting a dedicated action camera such as a GoPro for several years now; in fact, I first looked into it back in 2017 right before coming to Australia, but couldn't afford one at the time.

Fast forward to 2020, and with all the money I'm saving on not taking public transport and eating out during the week I could finally convince myself I could afford one. The latest GoPro model, the HERO9 Black, came out in September with some nice improvements (such as for timelapses), and after doing a lot of research into various action cameras out there I picked one up over a sale on Thanksgiving weekend! (GoPro has actual competition now, but its specific features were still the best fit for what I wanted.)

Tada! This was me attempting timelapses of the night sky. They're impressively easy to get, but not quite ready to show off.

I'm still experimenting with it, but today I've got my first video to show off. Last Thursday we were projected to have an afternoon thunderstorm, so I decided I'd put my camera out facing up and try to get a timelapse of the clouds passing overhead. Fortunately, I somehow started recording real-time video instead (still learning!), and it turned out that the thunderstorm dropped some hail as well (as they often do, in Melbourne, we had another hail storm less than a fortnight before that).

I was worried for my new camera, but more worried about myself dashing out into the hail to retrieve it, which worked out for the best as the camera's fine and I got a cool video of being in a hail storm. The storm itself passed in less than 30 minutes, so I sped the whole thing up 10× and made the following video out of it:

Anyway, that's all for now, but look forward to more—and hopefully more innovative and unique—videos from me in the future, as I figure out what kinds of videos I can get with something I wouldn't want to use my phone for. A hui hou!

How to Paint A (Specific Spectral Class of) Star

I said in my previous post that I don't like revealing projects in progress, but my current project is so cool that I can't resist. Plus, it's more like a series of projects so I don't mind revealing one that I've completed.

I've decided to do a series of seven paintings of the various spectral types of stars. I'm only doing main sequence stars for now, as this allows me to paint them all to scale and I love those kinds of visual comparisons. (People keep asking me about other types of stars such as white dwarfs or supergiants, and my response has been a firm “We'll see.” I can't really paint those to the same scale so I don't think I'd be able to do them justice, but perhaps something will come up.)

This past Wednesday I painted the second star in the series, a B-type star, and had the idea of filming the process to make a time lapse video of it. It came out so well that I decided to add some commentary explaining my creative process, since it's informed by things like thermodynamics and stellar structure (while still retaining a fair amount of artistic license, of course).

Anyway, here's the video! Painting while conscious of being filmed was an interesting challenge, but I think the finished product is pretty good. Enjoy!

A Trip to Healesville Sanctuary

Last month on the 5th of May I accepted an offer by a recently-graduated student at Swinburne for a lift out to the Healesville Sanctuary, a zoo/conservatory about an hour out of Melbourne in the Yarra Valley. Healesville Sanctuary focuses on native Australian fauna and has a strong captive breeding program, being the first place in the world to successfully breed platypuses in captivity in 1943.

I brought my camera with me, but about an hour after we arrived we attended a fantastic bird show where I decided to try out the new super-slow motion feature on the camera of my new phone. And after getting a few video clips of birds in slow motion, I thought why not get some more clips of various animals and make a video out of it? So I did.

I didn't remember or manage to get video clips of all the animals I wanted to, so there are a few still photos in there, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I'm especially pleased with that two-second side-on clip of a platypus swimming by; none of my attempts to photograph the platypuses worked out, but somehow the videos did. A hui hou!

A picture that didn't make it into the video but I thought was fun.

Fundamental Constants: Do They Actually Vary?

I can't remember if I've mentioned it on this blog before, but since the middle of December I've been planning on entering a competition among Australian universities for students or early-career scientists for videos that best showcase and explain your research. It's called the Pitch It Clever competition, and the idea is to make a one- to two-minute elevator pitch video. I decided on a live-action format as being easiest, finally got my filming done on Saturday, spent much of Sunday editing the resulting footage, and submitted it today!

I haven't written much here about what my Ph.D. research will actually encompass, partly (mostly) because I wasn't sure for a while. During the application process the idea was that I'd be working on fundamental constants, but looking at quasars. However, in the several months between accepting the university offer and actually moving here my supervisor came up with an idea of applying the same methods to solar twins instead, and offered me the choice to work on that when I arrived. Despite never having much interest in stars prior to this I found this idea more interesting (surprisingly), so that's what I chose.

The video says it pretty shortly and sweetly (I hope!), but just as a quick overview in case something I said wasn't clear:

All our modern theories of physics—known by the incredibly boring name of the Standard Model—rely on a number of quantities known as physical constants. Their values can't be calculated from within the theories themselves, but can only be measured. We call them ‘constants’ because we've never measured them to change but this is fundamentally an assumption, and one that has remained a niggling worry in the back of physicists' minds for around a century now.

The fine-structure constant, usually denoted with the Greek letter alpha (α), is one of these constants which characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions. It has a value of \(\alpha\approx1/137\) (but not exactly \(1/137\)!), and unlike some of the other constants is dimensionless meaning it has the same value in all systems of units. (Other constants, such as the speed of light, have units ‘built-in’ so to speak—the speed of light is, well, a speed, and has units as such: m/s or mph or whatever.)

Anyway, if the fine-structure constant were to vary, we can calculate the effects that this would have in the energy required for electrons to make quantum transitions between different atomic orbitals. (Well, we won't actually be doing those calculations, we have some collaborators who'll be doing that bit for us.) It turns out that transitions react differently—some require more energy, others need less, and some are barely affected at all.

The energy required for an electron to jump between orbitals is related to the energy of the photon of light it emits or absorbs when doing so. This means that we can potentially measure changes in the fine-structure constant by looking for changes in specific absorption lines in various spectra. By looking at pairs of lines that react oppositely, we can increase our confidence that a measured shift is caused by a varying alpha and not something else.

For the spectra I'll be looking at stars very similar to the sun, which are known as solar twins. There's no actual general definition for precisely what makes a star a solar twin, but intuitively it's just a star that's close to the sun in a number of ways. Since we can study the sun so well we can apply all that knowledge to solar twins too, again allowing us to have more confidence that any shifts we might see are truly due to alpha and not some other unknown process in stars very different from the sun.

And that's basically it. Actually measuring a change in alpha would be a truly remarkable undertaking (though it would likely take years to follow up on and be confident that it wasn't a fluke). Realistically, it's pretty unlikely to happen, but null results are also important in science. While alpha's been measured on earth and in various high-redshift quasars, it hasn't been measure very much on the scale of the Milky Way galaxy, and this would give us more knowledge about where this particular constant is constant, which is valuable in its own way.

It's been a late couple of nights working on this video so that's it for now (but feel free to ask questions in the comments if something I said was unclear)! A hui hou!

Transit of Venus: Reloaded: Director's Cut

Remaking and rebooting things seems to be all the rage these days, so I figured it was time for me to join the bandwagon and take a shot at redoing one of my old videos from 2012 about the transit of Venus. Well, actually I was recently reminded of its existence and decided that I could do better now. The original video was from before I'd started really working at video editing, and was probably made in Windows Movie Maker. I wouldn't call it bad, and you can already see some of the hallmarks of my video editing style even back then, but I think this one's a bit better overall. I've gone back and replaced the old version from 2012 with this one, as Blogger's video hosting abilities have always felt a bit shaky to me—one of the reasons I didn't upload many videos prior to getting a YouTube channel. (Two, actually, one for gaming that I introduced in the previous post and a second more general one seen here for everything else.)

(Fun fact, the title in the thumbnail there was recycled from the original video.)