Redwoods…in Australia‽ Happy New Year!

Well, here's some trees I didn't think I'd see in Australia:

REDWOODS!

Yep, that's right, authentic Californian redwoods, Sequoia sempervirans, in the flesh. Er, in the bark. Back in the 1930s the Australian Board of Works planted a patch of land that had been cleared of its original eucalyptus forest with 1,500 redwood trees imported from California (along with Bishop pine and Douglas fir) in an experiment in hydrogrogy. (The experiment's results are, sadly, unknown.)

I got to experience this cool home-away-from-home forest due to some friends from church, who planned a New Year's Eve barbecue lunch with a bunch of other people out in the Yarra Valley about seven kilometers from the forest, which we explored afterwards.

They're not too big around yet, but they're already quite tall!

The redwoods are planted in regular rows, giving an interesting effect as you walk around. Otherwise, add a few banana slugs and you could almost be back in California! (At least until you get to the edge of the forest and see the old-growth eucalyptus forest all around.) I've got some other pictures from the trip that I'll post when I get a chance, but for now, I'll wish you all hauʻoli Makahiki Hou, and I'll see you all in 2018!

Edit (1/1/2018): Have a few more pictures I didn't have time to include last night:

The Yarra River, where we had the barbecue before going to the redwoods, in the beautiful Yarra Valley.

Most trees here are between 55 and 80 meters tall (180–288 feet).

One feature not usually present in Californian redwood forests are these large man-made bird nests.

And while there may not be any banana slugs here naturally, it's nothing a few minutes with GIMP can't fix!

(Banana slug picture from the last time I used the “redwoods” tag on this blog, all the way back in 2010!)

For Want of a Sound Effect

I've been thinking recently about how I could improve the videos I make and one of the things I came up with (alongside “better editing in general”) was sound effects. Actually I've been looking for good sound effects off and on for over a year now; I've been using the site Freesound since last year, which houses a large collection of sounds that people have made available for free use under various open-source licenses (though the specifics of the license each sound uses may make it unavailable for commercial projects, or require attribution if you use it). Freesound has a decently large if occasionally eclectic collection, but it can be a bit hit-or-miss searching for specific sounds. It's also better for getting one or two specific sounds rather than a larger number of similar sounds that you can choose from.

I finally got motivated to search for alternate sources of sound effects last month, and eventually stumbled upon another website called A Sound Effect which is, in essence, an online marketplace for independent sound-effect artists to market their libraries of sound effects. It's quite professionally designed, and makes it easy to browse the hundreds of libraries it houses covering an astonishingly wide array of subjects. Every library comes with a demo reel to give you a taste of what's included, and I've found listening to them to be almost like aural candy; for some reason I find it incredibly satisfying listening to all these sounds broken down to their constituent parts. (Here are just a few I particularly enjoy; I also find myself paying a whole lot more attention to the various sounds in my environment after listening to a few of these!)

There's an end-of-the-year sale going on right now if any of you feel a sudden need to buy some sound effect libraries. I (sadly) don't have much use for most of these amazing sounds, but I've picked up a few smaller libraries for future use, and hope that this is a useful resource for anyone out there making videos or video games. A hui hou!

Merry Christmas 2017, Australian-Style!

Merry Christmas from the Land Down Under! Having just moved to Australia a few months ago, I couldn't quite justify the cost of flying home for Christmas, making this the second Christmas I'll be spending away from family. But thankfully I've made plenty of friends to spend it with instead, and will be heading over to the house of some friends I met at church.

Since Australia is pretty famous (or infamous) for its spiders, have a Christmas video featuring some peacock spiders…which I only just now while looking them up discovered actually come from Australia, making this serendipitously appropriate! I haven't seen any of these myself yet, though.

I actually came across this video last year but never got around to sharing it. I guess it worked out in the end though! A hui hou! Mele Kalikima a me Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou!

A New Profile Picture for the Summer Solstice!

I was recently reminded of the fact that what used to be my profile picture was, as of a week ago, eight years old. It's not a bad photo (which is saying something since I usually hate pictures of myself by default), but I was twenty when it was taken and I've grown and changed a bit since then.

The photo my old profile picture came from, from December 14, 2009. (That's Rainbow Falls in Hilo.)

Yesterday I had another grad student get a picture of me in front of the projector screen in the lunch room, and while it's not a great photo, it gave me the idea of using the background as a makeshift green screen combined with a few of the astrophotos I've taken over the years…

The initial picture…

…with the Lagoon Nebula…

…Omega Centauri…

…the Orion Nebula…

…and the western Veil Nebula as backgrounds.

I'm pretty pleased with how these came out, overall. I tried a number of other astrophotos of mine but they didn't work out for various reasons (the objects were usually too small and compact, or I just couldn't place them somewhere that looked good).

What does this have to do with the summer solstice I mentioned in the title? Ultimately very little, other than the fact that I always plan to write a post to note the passage of equinoxes and solstices and then never remember to actually do it. There's also the curious fact that, despite it being the summer solstice here in Melbourne, the longest day of the year, I still needed long pants and socks this morning and narrowly avoided needing to bring a coat with me due to the weather taking a swift turn for the frigid after the 30+ °C (90+ °F) temperatures we were having just two days ago. I think it's time to throw in the towel and admit that I'm never going to understand Melbournian weather.

I'm Writing for Astrobites!

Back in October, a few days after I'd arrived in Australia and started getting set up at Swinburne, one of the first emails I received at my new university address was a notice sent around to all students that applications for writing for Astrobites were now open. Never having heard of Astrobites, I checked it out and discovered that it's a blog collectively run by a diverse assortment of mostly graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics whose dual purpose is to 1) let grad students gain writing experience, primarily through its most common type of post, a daily summary of a scientific paper written at an undergraduate level (though more general posts on research, astronomy in general, and the graduate student experience are common), and 2) serve as a resource for undergraduate students to help them better understand what's going on in the world of astronomy by making important discoveries and concepts easier to understand.

Since distilling scientific concepts into (hopefully) easier-to-understand forms is something I've been doing sporadically on this blog for the past—wow, seven years‽ Has it really been that long?—anyway, since that's something I already enjoy doing from time to time, I applied and sent in a sample post in the style of Astrobites for the dealine mid-November, and this week I heard back from the hiring committee that I'd been accepted as a new writer! (You can find the official post that came out today detailing new authors here.)

Usually most writers work for a period of two years (though this is not formally set and can vary), both producing a post of their own and editing another author's post each month. As far as I can tell from the list of past authors there hasn't been anyone from Swinbune before, so I'm blazing a bit of a new trail here. The schedule for next month (which I'll be on) should come out this week, so I can start working on my first official post! (I'll probably use the sample post I submitted, though given another editing pass as I wasn't entirely happy with it even after spending several days working on it.)

Anyway, I'll link to my posts when they come out on Astrobites so you can hopefully look forward to monthly paper summaries from me for the next few years! A hui hou!

Edit: Also, just for fun, we had a hail storm this evening after I got home with hail up to the size of grapes coming down for a few minutes. Never a dull moment in Melbourne!

Clothespin for scale.

Weather in Melbourne

Melbourne weather is strange. Before coming here I'd read multiple things saying that it was highly variable and could change quickly—“If you don't like the weather in Melbourne, just wait fifteen minutes” was a joke I came across that embodies this. Hilo weather is much like this as well, sometimes changing often and quickly throughout the day, so I figured Melbourne weather would be much the same.

Now, this isn't incorrect; the weather here can indeed change pretty quickly throughout the day. However, it also applies on a somewhat longer time scale. For example: it's currently December here, equivalent to June in the northern hemisphere, coming up on the southern hemisphere summer solstice on December 21st…and the high today was 20 °C (68 °F), with an overnight low of 10 °C (50 °F). This isn't exactly what I think of as summer weather, and what's more confusing is that we did have some warm weather for a week or two in November. In fact, just a week ago we had a day of 40 °C (104 °F), where it was still 32 °C (89.6 °F) when I went to bed at 11 PM and still 27 °C (80.6 °F) when I woke up at 2 in the morning. Then a day later a huge storm hit and temperatures dropped precipitously throughout the day, and the day after that the temperatures were in the single digits (Celsius) and I was putting on socks in the morning and getting my coat out of the closet again. People I've talked have indicated this isn't entirely unusual, telling me of a day some years ago when they had a huge hail storm on Christmas, giving them a white Christmas in the middle of summer.

Melbourne is about the same southern latitude (~40°) as the northern latitude of California where I grew up (~39°) so I figured the weather would be roughly similar, but in California this kind of weather would be exceedingly strange. The temperature's more complex than a simple sine curve, of course, but on the scale of a week or so it's not a bad approximation; you don't get over 100+ (Fahrenheit) temperatures one day during the summer and then have temperatures plunging towards freezing two days later. I'm not a big fan of temperature extremes—to either side, but especially cold—so I hope this isn't too common a phenomenon, or it could be a long next few couple of years! A hui hou!

Gravitationally Unbound: Interstellar Interloper ʻOumuamua

So I'm pretty late to write about this and you may have already heard about it by now, but in case you haven't, on October 19th the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii discovered the first known object in our solar system that's unquestionably of extrasolar origin. The tiny interstellar wanderer, now known as 1I/2017 ʻOumuamua, was caught forty days after its closest approach to the Sun, and it was quickly realized that its speed—both on approach to and away from the Sun—was far too high for it to be gravitationally bound to the solar system.

This was pretty exciting, as this is the first time we've discovered an asteroid in our solar system that definitely came from outside it. There's been an intermittent stream of papers on ʻOumuamua over the weeks that followed its discovery, speculating on its possible origin, trying to figure out whether it's a comet or an asteroid (the latter seems most likely, given its complete lack of visible coma even after passing within the orbit of Mercury), even calculations on how far the Earth−Moon system would have moved if it were a macroscopic chunk of nuclear-density dark matter! (About ten meters/thirty-three feet was the conclusion, so don't worry about it.)

One of weirdest things about ʻOumuamua so far is its shape. Now, like all known asteroids it's much too small to make out its shape directly (even passing less than a fifth of the distance to the Sun from Earth). However, we can measure how its brightness changes over time (called its light-curve) which can tell us both how fast it rotates and how elongated it is…and that's the strange part. According to the large difference between the maxima and minima of its light-curve, ʻOumuamua must have a length ratio of something like 1:6 or even 1:10. Think cigar-shaped and you've got an idea of what it must look like. This is, needless to say, really, really odd, as nothing we know of in our solar system has a shape approaching anywhere near that ratio. Whatever it's made of must be holding itself together with more than just gravity.

Finally, if you're familiar with my blog, you've probably already guessed that the name ʻOumuamua is of Hawaiian origin. (And if you did, good job!) ʻOu means “to reach for,” while mua has several meanings but is generally associated with the idea of being first, foremost, leader, or senior. “I mua!” means “Forward!”, and ʻoumuamua (with some of that Hawaiian reduplication I've talked about) means scout (in a military sense), one sent on ahead or before. Which is the intended meaning of the name in this case, as ʻOumuamua will likely be only the first of more interstellar objects that we'll detect in the future.

Interesting times we live in! A hui hou!

An Australian Mountain Adventure

This Saturday I was invited on a sight-seeing trip to the Dandenongs (a mountain range just to the east of Melbourne) by a family from the church I've been attending, an opportunity I gladly jumped at.

Not the greatest picture as it was taken through the window of the car, but it gets the message across.

We stopped at a few places along the way up the delightfully winding road up the mountains, including a small town with a candy store (sorry, a “lollies shop”) where I picked up a small collection of sweets to try (purely in the spirit of sampling the local culture, of course!). Another place where we stopped for afternoon tea (read: snacks) had a large flock of cockatoos hanging around, plus a few other native birds.

These birds were quite used to being fed, and not shy about hanging around in hopes of food.

…to the point of happily jumping up on the picnic table in front of me!

It was really cool and a bit strange seeing flocks of birds flitting betwixt and sitting in the eucalyptus trees, as we didn't really have many birds that did that back in California, the only ones being the vultures that liked to nest in one particular large dead tree (and didn't do a lot of flitting among the branches, for obvious reasons).

This crimson rosella was perfectly fine walking underneath my seat, making it a little hard to photograph!

In fact, the cockatoos were comfortable enough with people to jump up your shoulder in search of food!

After our tea-time adventure, we hiked to Sherbrooke Falls in the Sherbrooke Forest National Park. On the whole, it reminded me of hiking amongst the redwoods back in California, except with eucalyptus trees instead. And what eucalyptus trees they were! I'd known that certain species of eucalyptus trees are among the tallest trees in the world (behind only redwoods), and having grown up among eucalyptus trees in California I thought I was familiar with their heights, but these trees were something else entirely. It's hard to guess of course, but I felt like many of the trees I saw had to have been at least twice as tall as the tallest eucalyptus trees I'd know previously, again underscoring the similarity to hiking in the redwood forests.

It's hard to tell and I could't get it all in one shot, but this is a tall tree.

The hike to the waterfall was quite pleasant, but the return journey was an adventure. It was a nice day when we set out, but as we started back the sky became cloudy and overcast. Soon we could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, then the tops of the trees were buffeted by an increasingly strong wind. By the time we'd gotten back to the carpark the first few large drops were falling, only for us to realize that we'd returned to the wrong carpark, having taken a wrong turn at one of the several branches in the trail on the way back.

As we regrouped to the map at the trail head and figured out where we were, the rain started coming down in earnest, followed soon after by hail! Luckily there were some other people leaving from the carpark due to the rain so our driver was able to get a ride back to the car and come back to pick us up where we were huddled beneath the increasingly-inadequate shelter of the tiny structure protecting the map as rain and hail pelted the ground around.

Thankfully we made it back through the hail and storm all right (though it was coming down fast enough to have significant water on the road in places), but it certainly made for quite the adventure! A hui hou!

Sir William Herschel: Accomplished Astronomer, Secret…Composer?

About five years ago, way back in 2012, I wrote a post describing how I had learned that Sir William Herschel, famous astronomer and discoverer of Uranus, was actually an accomplished classical musician and composer prior to becoming interested in astronomy. Looking back at that post, I realize I never bothered actually linking the album I'd found of some of Herschel's symphonies, so here's a link to that.

At the time, there wasn't a lot of Herschel's music available as recordings. Five years later, that's…actually still pretty much the case. Amazon has one CD with two random Herschel works (along with some Haydn for some reason?), plus a new CD in French that appears to be some of Herschel's organ works. I'm mostly guessing on that one, and it doesn't have a digital preview to check.

However! Over on Google Play Music, I came across a new album of Herschel's music that came out in 2015 when I searched his name there on a whim. It's a collection of six sonatas for harpsichord and violin, and it is fantastic. I've fallen in love with Herschel-as-composer all over again, and it makes me really wish more of his music was available, because seriously, this stuff is really really good.

You might be tempted to think that having only a harpsichord (one of my favorite instruments, by the way) and a violin would be a little limiting in what music you can make (Edit: on further listening, I'm pretty sure there's a cello in there too). Nope! Herschel manages to make each movement in each sonata completely unique, different and compelling, with some really interesting little musical motifs. I'm also not generally as big a fan of slow movements as I am of fast ones, yet he somehow made the Andante middle movement of the fourth sonata one of my favorite of the bunch!

All in all it's a really wonderful bit of music and I'd definitely urge you all to go have a listen. A hui hou!

Australian Creepy-Crawlies of the Redback Variety

So I've finally had a chance to see some of the things I shouldn't touch while in Australia! I went out for lunch on Sunday with a family from church, and after lunch as we were touring the yard they mentioned having noticed a redback spider a few days ago and and eagerly took me to see it where I managed to get a picture of a male and female pair (though they don't normally spend time this close together, that's an artifact of us disturbing them).

The large one on the right is a female, the smaller one is a male. Note the distinctive red stripe.

Redback spiders are in the genus Latrodectus, the widow spiders, to which the black widows I grew up with in California also belong. As such, they show very similar behavior, weaving stringy, chaotic-looking webs and being ambush predators, not being very aggressive, and generally only coming into contact with humans by accident. From what I've read their bites (of the females, specifically), although very painful, are hardly ever fatal. So that's reassuring, I guess. A hui hou!