Star Trails Over Mauna Kea

One thing about my new computer that I'm enjoying is the fact that the memory card reader works. The memory card reader in my laptop stopped working some years ago, but it wasn't a big enough concern for me to ever bother getting it fixed, as I could still transfer photos off my camera using its USB connection cable. However, as time went on, I found said connection getting worse and worse, making it harder and harder to get photos off my camera. This led to a period where I sort of stopped taking pictures with my camera, relying instead on my phone's camera (which I could still easily get pictures off of).

However, with my new card reader, I can once again easily access the photos I've taken, and I'm looking forward to taking more in the future. For the present, have this one I took back in May when I was sitting up on Mauna Loa waiting for the non-existent Camelopardalid meteors:

Star trails over Mauna Kea. Click to enlarge.

This is looking north from about 11,000 feet on Mauna Loa towards Mauna Kea, soon after sunset. Clouds fill the saddle and stretch as far as the eye can see, leaving the two mountains as dark islands in a sea of clouds. This photo was (I believe) a 30-second exposure, which is why the stars around the edge of the photo have moved and left trails (near the top and slightly left of center you can make out Polaris, about which all the rest of the stars appear to revolve). The light pattern on Mauna Kea is from cars' headlights and taillights as they ascend and descend the great winding access road to and from the Visitor Information Station (note the lack of lights higher than that, towards the observatories). The light in the clouds in the middle of the picture comes from beneath, from the Pōhakuloa Training Camp; I don't know what they were doing that night, but it involved a lot of bright lights flashing under the clouds.

This, unfortunately, was the only good picture I got after setting up before my battery died, as I hadn't gotten to charge it fully. I'd love to get back there sometime (now that I know I can make the drive in my car) and get some more and better pictures. But for now, a hui hou!

Surprise Observing Run

Wednesday night the observer at the JCMT suffered enough altitude sickness to require coming all the way down from the summit. She thankfully suffered no lasting effects and was up and about the next day, but we at the JCMT were understandably hesitant to let her back on the summit so soon. This led to a scramble to find someone to cover for her shift Thursday and Friday night, and, the normal support scientists being unavailable for Thursday, is how I found myself volunteering and turning a normal workday into an surprise trip up Mauna Kea.

I'm currently writing this post from the control room of JCMT. Given how much trouble I had staying awake back in May -- after spending a day at Hale Pohaku at 9,000 feet to acclimatize and switch my sleep schedule -- I was worried that coming up one day and observing that same night would be even worse, but I've been pleasantly surprised to find that I've been much more awake on the whole (perhaps it was the afternoon nap? the cup of coffee at dinner?). By this point, at 4:30 in the morning, even that wakeful energy is starting to flag a bit, but I think I'll be able to make it through the night without too much trouble. Three and a half hours left to go (roughly)!

Computer Construction Compendium

This past Friday, as I mentioned in my last post, I put my new computer together. I've been collecting parts for it for over two months, and was quite excited to finally build it (I would have put it together a week earlier except a move and a vacation intervened).

It was a fun experience (if a little nerve-wracking at times), and luckily I had the presence of mind to take pictures throughout the build process. For instance, here's everything involved in the build at the beginning of the process:

Here you can see the gaggle of assorted parts I collected. I'm not going to point them out individually as you'll see most of them further on, so I'll just say that on this table you can see the case, the power unit, the CPU, the RAM, the HDD, the SSD, the video card, the water cooler, the optical drive, the card reader, and the additional fan I got. That's a lot to get through, so to start off with here's a shot of the most fundamental part: the case.

Here you can see the interior of the excellent case I found, the Rosewill Thor V2. There are three fans on the front (to the right), the back (to the left), and the top of the case. There's also a fourth fan in the panel that forms the left side which is off in the picture to allow access to the interior. That nest of wires there connects to things on the front panel like the power button, the forward USB connectors, and the headphone/microphone jacks.

After the case, the next most important part of a computer is the motherboard, which serves as the physical and logical connector for all the other parts of the computer.

This particular motherboard is the ASUS Z97-A. There are a lot of slots and connections on it, but it'll be easier to point them out as I add things to them, so let's move on the CPU, which sits in the square socket in the top-middle of the board. The CPU (which stands for Central Processing Unit, hence why it is also sometimes called the processor) is the calculation center of the computer, and the most important factor in how fast your computer is.

The socket actually comes with a little cover on it to protect the pins inside, which you can't see because I forgot to take a picture before putting the CPU in the socket. Instead of putting the pins on the CPU, Intel switched sometime in the last few years to having them on the motherboard, and having the CPU sit gently atop them (held in place by a little spring-arm). Here's what it looks like with the arm down:

I don't think the white lines do anything, I think they're just decoration.

The gleaming square metal surface there is the interface where the prodigious heat modern processors put out is conducted away by some form of cooler to keep them from overheating. The processor I got (the Intel Core i5-4690K, 3.5GHz) comes with a small fan+heat sink that is meant to sit atop the CPU, but  in the warm climate of Hawaiʻi I wanted to ensure that it wouldn't get too hot running some of the games I like, so I got something a little higher-caliber which you'll see later on.

After installing the processor, I installed the motherboard into the case:

With the motherboard screwed into place in the case, I could stand the whole assembly up and access the back of the motherboard to install the necessary infrastructure to attach the cooler for the CPU:

This backplate (which surrounds the CPU on the back of the motherboard) confused me no end for some time, as it didn't seem to fit the holes in the motherboard. I was worried because the manual for the cooler didn't actually say it was compatible with the CPU socket I had, and I was going off somewhere else I'd read it on the Internet. For the record, yes, the Corsair H90 self-contained liquid cooler does work with Intel LGA 1150 sockets; use the sockets marked 1156, and rotate it until the holes line up. That was what had me confused, as I thought it went on straight and spent some time fiddling around trying to get the holes to line up. Anyway, it did finally go in, as you can see. The rest of the cooler sits on the other side, and we'll see it later on.

Anyway, after that, comes the RAM (or Random Access Memory, the short-term memory of the computer):

The RAM is those two white modules there, next to the CPU. I went with two 4GB modules of Kingston HyperX FURY DDR3 RAM for a total of 8 gigabytes of RAM. I don't do a lot of stuff where more RAM would be useful, and I really liked the look of those particular card - they go very nicely with the white case.

After the RAM, I installed the video card - an NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti, by EVGA -

- and the Power Supply Unit (PSU), a KingWin Lazer Platinum Series 550 Watt unit. The "Platinum" in the name says that it has greater than 90% efficiency in certain circumstance (such as when you're using around 50-75% of its maximum rated power). The PSU is a very very important part of your computer - it's the part that provides power at the right voltage and amperage to everything else, and (in theory) takes the fall if you get a power surge. So don't skimp on it. The high efficiency is also nice as that means less power wasted as heat before it even reaches the rest of your parts.

And here are both of them installed in the case and motherboard:

(The video card is a little hard to see, but it's horizontal directly above the PSU.)

After this I installed the optical drive (a simple DVD/CD reader/writer) and the multi-card reader I got into the front of the case. They weren't anything special, so I just took a shot of them installed in the front:

(Optical drive at the top, card reader in the middle.)

I then installed the hard disk drive (HDD) and solid-state disk (SSD) into two of the bays for them:

For the HDD I got a Western Digital 1 terabyte “Blue” drive (a reliable brand, with tons of space), while for the SSD I got a Crucial MX100 512GB drive, which is pretty much the best price-per-gigabyte SSD out there at the time of writing, while still being large enough for what I wanted. My intention from the start was to install my operating system and programs on the SSD for its much faster loading times, while storing large files that don't need to load super-fast like pictures, music, and movies on the HDD. Having set it up like that, I can say that so far it's working well.

Finally, it was time to install the water cooler. This was tricky, because, well...it's probably easier to show you:

This is the Corsair H90 self-contained liquid cooler. The part that I'm holding sits clamped to the top of your CPU and conducts heat from it into water which a small pump circulates through those rubber tubes into the radiator you see lying on the table. It's a bit tricky to install because that "self-contained" term in the name means that it's all one piece.

This is actually a very useful thing, because liquid cooling used to require that you put it together yourself, buying the pump, radiator, and tubes separately and assembling them (and filling them) yourself. You can still do that if you want to get fancy, but when it comes to water and computers there are far too many things that can go wrong, so I opted for the pre-built system where the water is already inside it and never gets a chance to fry sensitive electronic components.

Anyway, despite wishing I had a third hand at times, I managed to finagle the cooler onto the CPU (using that backplate structure we saw near the beginning), and attach the radiator to the fan on the back of the case. Here's what that looks like:

Pretty slick if I say so myself. At the moment I'm not quite done with this, as at the moment the fan in the case is only pulling air through the radiator. I'd like to mount the fan from the first picture on the side you see here to push through the radiator as well, to get the maximum amount of air through to keep things as cool as possible. I didn't have enough screws to be able to do that, but it's just a matter of popping down to Home Depot and picking up the right ones. Luckily, the liquid cooling is effective enough that heat hasn't nearly been a problem, but I've got the fan so I might as well use it.

Anyway, sans that fan, here's a view of the completed build:

(The other side is a bit of a tangled mess of cables, as I wove them back and forth through the holes in the case to keep as few obstructions for moving air in the case as possible.)

Anyway, with that done, it was time to set the peripherals up and try it out (and boy, what a sweet, sweet thing it was to hear the fans begin to spin up and self-test lights begin lighting up the first time I pressed the power button):

And there you have it. I left the side panel off for this shot, but it's now back on so the attached fan can help keep things cool.

And let me tell you, I set out to build a powerful computer that would have no heat problems, and from what I've seen so far, I succeeded. I can measure the temperatures of all four cores in the CPU, and while idling they run about 30 degrees Celsius, which is just a bit warmer than room temperature (86 degrees Fahrenheit). Even after a few hours of playing something like Civilization V that would have my old laptop running too hot to touch within minutes I haven't seen temperatures go above the low 40's Celsius (~100 Fahrenheit), and the air coming out the back from the radiator is only just noticeably warmer than the surrounding air. I wanted to make sure my computer wouldn't overheat in the warm tropical Hawaiian air, and from the looks of things I've done so very well indeed.

I could write at length about the trials and tribulations I had getting my chosen operating system, Linux Mint Debian Edition, running on such new hardware, but suffice it to say that with the help of a friend from work much more knowledgeable than I we got it working after a few hours. I'm now on Linux, and - unlike when I tried it with Ubuntu several years ago - I'm already thinking of it as my main operating system. Again, I could talk a lot about it, but it's getting late so perhaps I'll save it for another post. Anyway, hope that was interesting for any would-be computer builders out there. A hui hou!

Edit (9/14/14): Just realized that I said I got the Western Digital “Black” HDD when I actually got the “Blue” one, which is one step down in performance and good bit cheaper (it's the consumer-oriented version, while the Black is more server- or enthusiast-oriented). I did originally pick out a Black drive before rethinking it and still had it in my notes.

Also, a few weeks after this post went up I finally managed to find the right screws and installed my Noctua 140mm fan in the case to push through the radiator. Check it out:

Noctua's fans' unique brown aesthetic doesn't really go with...well, anything, but but it certainly lives up to its billing as a quiet, high-quality fan. With that, I now have a total of six fans pushing air through this case and keeping it just a smidgen above room temperature.

I also finally caved and bought myself a second monitor (I'm spoiled from having two at work, with the attendant productivity boost it brings). It just makes it so much easier do certain things, especially thing involving photos (have GIMP open on one screen, file manager or browser open in the other, etc.).

I also had some strange experiences which I was able to diagnose as running out of RAM, which caused the computer to freeze. I found this exceedingly odd, as I have 8 GB in this system, the same as my old laptop, and it never had any problems like this. I then learned that Linux doesn't automatically set up a swap space on disk (something Windows does by default), so I was most likely swapping things all the time on the laptop without knowing it. I was able to set up a swap partition on my own (I was so proud!), but I've decided that since I have an extra two slots for RAM I might as well go ahead and bump the system up to 16 GB to allow me to work on large photo panoramas without having to worry so much about running out of RAM

Back Again

I think this is the longest time I've been between posts on this blog so far, for a number of reasons: since my last post, I have a) moved houses, and b) gone on vacation for a week with nearly zero Internet access. I also finally got the Internet hooked up in my new place just yesterday.

I also, just yesterday, finally had enough free time (and all the parts) to construct the new computer for which I've been collecting parts for two months (I got the final part - the processor - in on Thursday). It was a lengthy process - the build alone took almost three hours, and I then spent three and a half more trying and failing to get Linux installed on it. I was finally able to accomplish that with assistance from a more knowledgeable friend and another five hours of work this afternoon, so yes, I'm writing this post on my new computer. Yay!

I had the presence of mind to take some pictures during the build, so when I have some time I'd like to write a post going over the process in detail. But for now it's getting late, so a hui hou!

Moving House

I haven't said anything about it yet here on my blog, but I've been looking for a new house to call home since the beginning of the month. This is part of why I haven't had many posts recently, as I've been busy researching potential places. Last week I found one, this week I signed the new lease, and as of today (Saturday) I'm moving in. I'm not a very fast mover, so the move will be completed tomorrow, but so far I've got most of the important stuff (like furniture), and enough amenities to actually spend tonight there.

The chaos of moving. Pretty much all of that furniture has been moved elsewhere by now.

The place is a nice little upstairs duplex unit, higher up in elevation than where I've been living. I can see the ocean (through some houses and telephone wires), and it should have a nice unimpeded access to any trade wind breezes blowing from out across the deep blue Pacific. It's actually on somewhat of a slope, which marks my first time living up on an incline in my memory (I have the haziest of memories of living in a house on a slant in Israel, when I was merely four or five, but that doesn't really count).

One downside of moving is that the cable company apparently can't get the Internet hooked up until the 11th, so I may be somewhat quiet these next two weeks. I can always get online other ways, but blog-writing may not be high on my priority list at those times!

We'll see, I suppose. This is my first time moving on my own – it was with some shock that I realized I've lived in this place for longer than I've had this blog (I moved to Hilo from home in August 2009 to attend UHHilo, about 5 months before I started writing this blog). Anyway, it's been a long day of moving heavy furniture up and down stairs, and I have a lot of cleaning and little more moving to do tomorrow. A hui hou!

More Lei Crochet

Boy, once you get the hang of it these simple crochet projects are really easy! In less than a week I've finished a second lei (it helped that I had several long meetings and presentations to sit through this week). This one is supposed to resemble a lei made of flowers from the ginger that grows wild around here, or ʻawapuhi to give it its Hawaiian name.

I can confidently state that I've learned a lot in the process of making these two lei. After the first one, I realized I'd been making it wrong; rather than producing the coiled structure by rolling the lei lengthwise, I'd actually physically attached each petal further around the central stem chain. I fixed that mistake on this lei, only to realize after I'd finished that I'd been doing my double crochet loops all wrong, and that my connection of the two ends could be vastly improved. I've got another meeting tomorrow and I'm looking forward to starting another lei, correcting those shortcomings, and putting my new end-connection plan into action. A hui hou!

Lei Crochet

I've never mentioned it on this blog because it happened a few years before I started writing it, but in my teens I asked my mother to teach me how to crochet, which she graciously did. My actual output never amounted to more than a doily and a couple of simple scarves, and I slowly petered out of doing it as I went through college, but I enjoyed doing it, and occasionally thought about taking it up again.

Around the time I stopped I put a book on my wishlist called “Hawaiian Lei in Crochet” by Roberta E. Wong (I think I had just moved or was about to move to Hawaii at the time and was interested in all kinds of island things). I'd pretty much forgotten all about it after a few years until it showed up at my door a few weeks ago, a birthday gift from my dear aunt Susan.

Having been thinking about taking up crochet again, a book full of neat but relatively simple pattterns was just the impetus I needed. I picked what looked like an easy recipe, went out and bought some hooks and yarn, and set to work. I found it to be a wonderful activity during long meetings at work – having something to occupy my hands with actually lets me pay more attention to the proceedings than otherwise.

Anyway, fast forward a few weeks, and I've just completed my first lei.

This particular lei is meant to imitate the ʻākulikuli flower, one I'm not personally familiar with (I chose it because it looked like a nice easy recipe to start out with, as indeed it proved). A little searching on my part reveals that there are multiple different plants in the Hawaiian isles with that name, with accordingly varied pictures available, but I found some pictures of lei that look pretty similar (if a bit more vividly pink).

Anyway, I'm pretty excited to have completed my first crochet project in several years, and one that looks so good to boot. I'm not entirely sure I followed all the instructions correctly, but I got something good-looking out of it so I'm happy. There are about twenty recipes in the book, many of which I'd like to try at some point, so I'll probably have some more pictures of crochet lei up eventually. A hui hou!

Building a Computer

I've finally done my research, picked out parts for my new computer, and started ordering them, and this past week I had a few parts come in, namely the case, keyboard, and speakers.

The case I settled on is the Rosewill "Thor" V2-W, seen below. It's a large case, as they come; it's just under 23 inches tall, a little over 9 inches wide, and a hair under 22 inches front to back. This spaciousness helps ensure there's lots of room for air to flow through and keep things cool – a necessity for me here in Hawai‘i with no air conditioning. The white fins along the top of it can be opened (as in the picture) to increase air-flow, and those black patches along the side are mesh-covered openings to let the cooling zephyrs in.

The Rosewill Thor V2-W.

On the front you can see the usual connectors you might expect to find – USP 2.0, USB 3.0 (a nice feature), headphone and microphone jacks, an eSATA jack for plugging in external hard drives, and to the sides, two fan-speed control knobs.

Below, in this side shot, you can see one of the huge 230 mm fans that moves air through this thing. Believe it or not, there are actually three of those gargantuan fans in this behemoth of a case; the one seen there, one in the front panel at the bottom, and a third in the top panel at the top (not to mention a comparatively dinky but still large 140 mm fan in the back panel near the top). I was pleased to discover that the mesh on the sides allows a decent view of the interior; I'm thinking of putting in a few LEDs which could be turned on to illuminate the inside while the computer is running.

I didn't get a picture of my new speakers as I went for the cheapest pair I could find that still got great reviews, and while they certainly sound good they aren't anything special to look at. My new keyboard, on the other hand, is well worth looking at:

This is the Corsair Vengeance K70 mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches. The picture doesn't do it justice, but this thing is gorgeous. It's got a nice adjustable red backlight which you can just see in the picture, an elegant black anodized aluminum body (no cheap plastic here!), and some really enjoyable mechanical switches.

Mechanical keyboards, if you don't know, utilize mechanical switches for the keys, instead of the membrane, dome-switch, or scissors-switch found in most laptops and cheaper keyboards today. Mechanical switches use little springs in each individual key, which makes them more expensive to produce, but after using one for a few days I can see why people rave about them so much.

Mechanical switches today predominately come from one company, Cherry MX, which makes color-coded switches with different feels and sound-levels. After some research into the various types available, I settled on the Browns, which are an excellent choice for typing. Each key activates after a mere 2 millimeters of travel after which it can depress another 4 millimeters before bottoming out, while the activation is accompanied by a distinct tactile ‘bump.’ After some practice this has allowed me to type extremely fast because I don't need to bottom out each key like on my laptop's scissors-switch keyboard; I can stop pressing as soon as I feel the ‘bump,’ which helps me type faster. I'm using the keyboard (plugged into my laptop) to write this post, in fact.

It's a little hard to see in the face-on picture I took, but one striking feature of this keyboard is that the keys aren't embedded in the faceplate, instead appearing to float a few millimeters above it. It's a neat design choice that may also be rather practical: I read a few reviews that mentioned that this feature made it easier to clean under the keys (always a good thing for a keyboard).

Anyway, I should stop gushing over my new toys and get to bed. I probably won't go in detail over the rest of my components, as I doubt people would be as interested in the RAM or hard drive I chose compared to the more visually interesting things. I'll almost certainly do a post on the completed project, though don't expect it for a few weeks – I've been ordering parts in batches, watching for any good sales or discounts I can get, so I don't know exactly when I'll have everything. A hui hou!

Camelopardalids Dissapointment

Last time I mentioned I and friend from work were heading up to Mauna Loa to try to catch a possible new meteor shower, the Camelopardalids. The reason I decided on Mauna Loa rather than Mauna Kea is because the radiant of the Camelopardalids was going to be in the constellation of Camelopardalus (the Giraffe), which is right up close to the north celestial pole. The Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea, however, is on the south side of the mountain, meaning the mountain would block out most of our view to the north. Thus, I decided to head up to 11,000 feet on Mauna Loa to the observatories there, which are on the south side.

Getting up to Mauna Loa is an arduous process. Unlike Mauna Kea, with its two-lane paved road to 9,000 feet, Mauna Loa has only a single lane road (though as of two years ago, it is at least paved its entire way). It's over twice as long as its Mauna Kea cousin and winds like a roller coaster for most of its length, so that although the grade is on average much less, you just can't get any speed up with all the twists and turns. Thus it took us almost a full hour to get from Saddle Road to 11,000 feet where we set up just a few minutes before 8 PM when the shower was projected to begin.

Unfortunately, the meteor shower didn't happen. We stayed up for nearly two full hours (the projected time for the shower), and in that entire time I saw three meteors, all of which were random and unrelated to the shower. In my time working at the Visitor Information Center I spent many an evening outside, and three meteors is an entirely typical number to see in that time. From what I've read, no one else really saw anything either. There was one report of people seeing a larger number of meteors than normal, but nothing that would really stand out, and they were offset by the large number of reports similar to mine: nothing out of the ordinary.

Oh, well. In science a null result can often be just as interesting – if not more so – than a positive one. We've learned something, and the theorists will have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what. It wasn't the spectacular shower I was hoping for, but if I'm honest it's much closer to what I was expecting (though I was expecting at least a few meteors). It may not have been “the great meteor shower of ‘14,” but there's always next time. Speaking of which, a hui hou!

(Shooting) Star Warnings: A New Shower

I've been asked a few times this week about "the big meteor shower on Friday," but truth be told, I hadn't paid it much attention. I don't usually pay much attention to meteor showers, partly because they've always felt like an established part of the cycle of things – if I miss the Perseids this year, I can always catch them again next year, after all.

I changed my tune a bit when I came across an article this morning describing tonight's shower as a new shower. It's supposed to come about from the comet 209P/LINEAR, and will be supposedly the first time the earth will come in contact with the cast-off streams of debris this old comet sloughed off on every trip around between 1803 and 1924. (The comet has an orbital period of 5.09 years, which suggests it took about 24.8 trips around this sun in that time.)

Anyway, the salient point is that according to calculations there should be a shower of meteors from 209P/LINEAR between 6 and 8 UTC May 24th. This works out to be a very nice 8-10PM the previous (Friday) night here in Hawai'i; for the West Coast it'll be 11PM Friday night through 1AM Saturday morning; and for the East Coast it'll be 2-4AM.

The interesting thing is that this shower is calculated to be visible almost exclusively from North America and Hawai'i. This is partly due to the fact that its radiant – the location on the sky which all the meteor trails trace back to, and from which they all appear to radiate from – is in the far-northern constellation Camelopardalis. Following the tradition for naming meteor showers, the new showed has thus been termed the Camelopardalids.

Camelopardalis (meaning "giraffe") is a fairly modern constellation (created in 1612 or 1613) made up of a number of faint stars very close to the north celestial pole. It borders upon Ursa Minor, which contains Polaris, the North Star. Finding Camelopardalis will be rather difficult if you have any kind of light pollution system, but luckily since the radiant is so close to Polaris you can locate it to a good approximation by simply facing north. Although, it should be noted, sometimes it's better to watch a meteor shower by facing away from the radiant so that you catch the meteors that glance through the atmosphere (and thus produce long impressive trails) rather than the ones that punch into it head on (and thus make only short trails). So you might have more luck facing south, then lying down and looking up.

I don't know if this post will give enough time for you to prepare to watch the shower, but I thought I'd put it up quick in case it helps someone. I'm planning on heading up Mauna Loa to try to catch it and maybe even get some pictures, if it turns out to be good. That's the excitement of a new shower; no one knows how good it'll be. The best meteor showers, currently, are the Leonids in November and the Perseids in August, which can have up to 80 meteors per hours. This new shower has been predicted to have anywhere from 30 per hour (fairly weak, but noticeable) to a stunning 1,000 per hour. Given how these predictions tend to go, it will probably be a decent shower, but nothing spectacular (personally I doubt it'll be more than ~80 per hour or so) – but there's always that chance, that tiny chance that it will turn out to be something spectacular. And given that I don't need to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning to see it, I'm going to take that chance and see what happens. I'll have another post up soon detailing how it turned out. A hui hou!