Latest eruption wrapping up, it looks like

Well, it was fun while it lasted: over the past few days the indications are that Mauna Loa's latest eruption is coming to an end. It's always possible it could restart, of course, but observations of past eruptions suggest that's pretty unlikely. Interestingly, Kīlauea's latest eruption (which started the day I returned to Hilo last year, September 29th) also seems to have stopped, with the lava lake in its caldera abruptly cooling and solidifying. It's an open question how much influence the two volcanoes have on each other – for instance, historically Mauna Loa has often been active while Kīlauea was quiet, and vice versa, but that's certainly not always true. They're definitely two separate volcanoes with separate magma reservoirs, and go off independently, but their general proximity makes it seem likely that there could be some degree of influence between them. It's possible that magma erupting from Mauna Loa in this eruption relieved pressure on Kīlauea's magma chamber and in some part caused its eruption to end, for instance. But it remains an area of active research for now.

On the mundane side of things, this means Saddle Road is no longer in danger of being overflowed, which, depending on where it happened, could've been very bad news for the observatories on Maunakea (not to mention a very large number of other people who rely on Saddle Road to get across the island). The observatories on Mauna Loa remain cut off, as the flow crossed the Mauna Loa access road very early on in the eruption. It was definitely strange to see photos of it, considering how familiar I am with that road. Assuming that the eruption has indeed stopped at this point, I'm curious to see how long it'll take for the road to be reopened (or rebuilt?) and when I can get up to its end again. Once that happens and the volcano is deemed safe and the summit trails reopened I definitely would like to tackle hiking Mauna Loa's summit again, to see where the fresh lava coated the caldera's floor.

And that brings up the really interesting question: when will the next eruption happen? The thirty-eight year period between the previous eruption and this one was the longest in recorded history for Mauna Loa. Prior to this, it erupted fairly frequently; I've seen five and nine years for its average eruption frequency, so it might depend on how you count, but the point is that it happened pretty often. Of course, there was significant variability among historical eruptions, with multiple eruptions sometime occurring in a single year and a recent twenty-five year quiet period from 1950 to 1975. So who knows? We might be back to seeing eruptions every few years, or it might be decades again before the next one. We'll just have to wait and see! As I've said at least once before on this blog, life's never dull when you live on an active volcano in the middle of the ocean. A hui hou!

Lava viewing on Mauna Loa

It's been an exciting week as Mauna Loa continues to erupt here on Hawaiʻi island for the first time in 38 years. On Monday night last week (the first full day of the eruption) it was clear enough that from Hilo we could see a red glow in the sky off to the west. It wasn't the easiest to capture on camera, but here's a passable photo of it:

Glow of lava off to the west, as seen from Hilo.

My family left for home the next morning, and since I had the rest of the day off I took the opportunity to head up Saddle Road to see if I could see the lava. To make a long story short, the answer was yes, after an hour waiting around for clouds to lift. Which they did, thankfully, a little before sunset, allowing a good view of the rivers of molten rock coursing down Mauna Loa's sides from Puʻu Huluhulu.

Lava seen through trees on Puʻu Huluhulu (and clouds).

Here you can see a lava fountain in silhouette high up on the rift zone and the lava as it snaked its way down the volcano. This is as good a time as any to mention that I got a new phone last month, the Pixel 7 Pro, and I'm finding myself rather impressed with its camera. While its maximum 30× zoom isn't anything I'd want to share, I find it can still get good results like this into the teens× zoom range, and certainly much better than my previous (almost 5-year-old) phone (which got pretty bad beyond maybe ~2–3×). Anyway, here's one last wide photo to get a better sense of the scale:

View south from Puʻu Huluhulu toward lava coming down Mauna Loa.

The lava was still pretty far away at that point (I think about 18 km), so even though I tried sending my drone out towards it I couldn't get close enough for the view to appreciably change. The news since then has been all about how the front of the flow is approaching Saddle Road, though it's been getting slower over time as the lava reaches flatter areas, and even if it continues at it's current pace unabated (which is unlikely) it'll be over a week before it reaches the road. It'd be pretty major if it did, as Saddle Road is the shortest route between the east and west sides of the island and thus a major thoroughfare, and no matter which side of the Maunakea access road it hypothetically covers it'd create a major headache for some of the observatories up there. It's currently coming pretty much straight down the line dividing east from west, so at some point it'll have to split to one side or the other, and then we'll probably have a better idea of where (and if) it'll cross the road. (If it heads west, the road rises higher on Maunakea's slopes and will probably be fine; east is a bit more iffy, considering the road currently sits on lava flows from mid-last-century.)

I haven't been up since Tuesday since the weather has, unfortunately, been rather poor, often with thick clouds over the Saddle region meaning I wouldn't see much of anything even if I did go up. (It got lost among all the volcano coverage, but we actually got snow on Maunakea's summit the same night the eruption started.) I'm definitely keeping an eye on things, though, and if the weather clears up enough to make viewing reasonable I'll probably be heading up the mountain again, camera(s?) in tow. Anyway, to summarize, no one's in danger at this point (historical evidence suggests that the eruption will remain confined to the northeast rift zone and not threaten people on the west and south), and any potential danger to infrastructure is also likely not imminent (and even then, it's ultimately just a road, rather than a residential neighborhood or something). It has been (and will continue to be) very interesting to watch this develop, though! A hui hou!

Mauna Loa, awakened again at last!

Exciting news to wake up to this morning: after 38 years, its longest recorded quiet period in history, Mauna Loa is erupting again! There's not much information available yet, but apparently it started erupting about 11:30 PM last night, November 27. 

This is a frame from the USGS webcam situated on the rim of the summit caldera of Mauna Loa, which saves an image every hour into a 24-hour GIF; this one is the first showing the eruption breaking out along a fault line and spreading lava across the caldera floor. So far it seems like the eruption may be confined to the summit caldera, though it might also have spread a few kilometers outside it. We'll know more once they can do an overflight, hopefully today.

Oh, and there's the first snow of the winter season on Maunakea this morning too, apparently. It's a big day! I'm looking forward to having more updates soon on this historic event. A hui hou!

Waiale Falls and surrounds

One fun side effect of getting a drone and wanting simply to get out and fly with it in the beginning has been exploring and finding places relatively nearby that I hadn't been to or didn't know about before. One such place is Waiale Falls on the Wailuku River, just on the outskirts of Hilo. There's a bridge which crosses the river just below the falls, offering a nice vantage point, and it's actually more than just a single waterfall, as the topography makes for some interesting and complicated confluences and meanderings of waterways. Since it's only about 10 minutes from my house (while offering some relative solitude for practicing drone pilots), I've gone there a number of times both to take photos and practice my flying.

There are actually two main waterfalls in quick succession along the Wailuku river, two streams which join with it in the space of a few dozen meters, and an area where water splits off above the top waterfall only to meander around and join with the river again. In the image from Google Maps below, the road (Waiānuenue Avenue) crosses the Wailuku near the center-bottom of the image. To its left you can see the lower falls, then there's an island in the river and the upper falls, plus the Kapehu and Nakakauila Streams which join the river.

However, while the overhead view is useful if you know what you're looking at, a nice drone shot can be a lot more immediately understandable:

Here's a shot of the same area (looking roughly south-west), though with the lower falls hidden behind trees. It's hard to see, but the area where the cars are parked in the center is actually an island itself, as a stream splits off from just above the upper falls and meander down around below the bridge in the foreground, only to join the river again below the bridge below the lower falls. It's tricky to see because of trees, but here's a shot showing the area around the upper falls:

Despite what it might look like, the two pools of water here are not connected: there's a spur of rock that separates them (behind the foreground tree), letting the waters of the main river continue on the left while splitting those on the right off to meander around before rejoining the river. It's a really interesting formation and one that I suspect isn't particularly common!

Here's a shot showing the two falls and the area between them with a sort of gravel-bar island a bit better (the bridge is just out of shot to the bottom):

The lower fall clearly has some man-made construction going on, though I don't know the details. Incidentally, the name Waiale comes from the words wai and ʻale, meaning “rippling water,” so I suspect the pond's been there since before anything was done to the lower fall. There are some (rough, unnofficial) trails in the area which let you walk up to that area, and I've seen people swimming around the island. When the river's low like in the photos it's probably not too bad, but the Wailuku is the single most dangerous river in the state, responsible for something like 30% of river drowning deaths annually, so I wouldn't exactly advise it unless you really know what you're doing. When it rains the water flow of the river can increase by something like a hundred times over what it looks like in these photos in a very short span of time, so you definitely don't want to get caught in a flash flood. (In fact, the name of the river, Wailuku, translates roughly to “waters of destruction.”)

Here's one final photo of the lower falls, taken from below the level of the bridge just above the water to give a perspective on its power even in its relatively low-flow state:

(These photos were taken on different days, which is why the lighting conditions differ so much between them.) All in all, I enjoy this area (which I hadn't visited prior to June), and it makes a conveniently-nearby place to go relax and fly after work if I want something more interesting than houses in Hilo to look at. It's started raining more again lately as we come into the wet season here, so I'm hoping to catch it soon in a higher-flow state to compare with these photos. I might even put together a video if I can get enough good clips.

On a related note, my family will be visiting for a week over Thanksgiving and I'm looking forward to getting photos of the various places we visit, so I'll probably have a raft of new exciting photos to share before long. It'll probably take a bit of time to sort through everything and post them, but I should have some great new stuff to share in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving! A hui hou!

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!

Bread-baking bowls

So I'm about a year and a half late to the homemade bread-making party, but better late than never, right? For whatever reason I just wasn't really interested at the beginning of the pandemic while the rest of the world was discovering it and tweeting about it. I don't know why; it's not like it's a foreign concept to me – my parents had and used a bread-making machine while I was growing up – but I think the only bread I've baked myself was the time I made the Berke family pretzel recipe.  

Up until this past week, that is! I recently discovered a nifty device for helping with bread-making, and it's such a simple idea it's a surprise I hadn't heard of it before. It's essentially a silicone bowl by a company called Lékué, which allows you to do all the steps within it: mixing, kneading, rising, and baking. Yep, just pop it in the oven to bake at the end (no need to transfer to another container), or in my case I just use my combination microwave/convection oven/air fryer. I made some bread using one of the recipes that came with the bowl this week, and for not having done it before it came out splendidly.

That's the bowl on the left.

I've now baked a second loaf, and can hardly wait to try out more recipes. The ones that come with the bowl are pretty small, but it could easily hold a more “normal” sized loaf, so that's something to experiment with in the future. It's great to have the smell of fresh bread wafting through the house, and I'm looking forward to baking a lot bread in years to come. 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!

An aerial view of Richardson beach

I randomly learned today that August 30 is National Beach Day, so in honor of this day I'd never heard of before, have this lovely panorama I put together from a visit to Richardson beach a few weeks ago.

Richardson beach is a popular local place on the outskirts of Hilo to go for swimming, and I think snorkeling as well; those little outlying island help break up the incoming waves. It's actually appeared on this blog before, way back in the misty recesses of 2011, when I was still only an undergraduate student in my second semester at UH Hilo trying to get some decent sunrise photos. Since I don't, in general, tend to spend a lot of time near the ocean that previous trip remains one of the handful of times I've seen a sea turtle here. It's  Anyway, happy National Beach Day! 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!