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!

Four weeks with the Steam Deck: a limited review

This past Thursday I finished making changes to my second paper and writing the response to the referee about it, and sent them around to my co-authors. While I'm not completely done at this stage, that should be the last really major bit of work I need to do on both papers, and I should – finally – start having a bit more free time to devote to other pursuits once again. Like, say, writing more blog posts.

My productivity these past four weeks has not been helped by the arrival of my long-awaited Steam Deck. If you don't know what a Steam Deck is, it's probably easiest just to show you a picture:

Briefly, it's a portable hand-held computer designed for playing games pretty much anywhere. Valve, the company behind Steam (the biggest digital game store for PCs), announced them out of the blue last year (I want to say around August), with a few days' warning before opening up a system where people could put $5 down to reserve a spot in a queue to be able to buy one as Valve produced them. Originally slated for Christmas 2021, they were delayed to the end of March due to supply chain issues, but have been steadily rolling out since with production ramping up over time.

They also turned out to be overwhelmingly popular. I got my reservation in about an hour and fifteen minutes after the system went live (which necessitated getting up at 4 AM in Melbourne), and it took over four months before they worked through all the reservations before mine and I got my eagerly-awaited email letting me know I could put in an order. (I'd have been in the first five minutes if the Steam servers hadn't overloaded and crashed with everyone trying to reserve one at once when it went live.)

It's basically the device I've been waiting for practically my entire life, though hardware and technology needed to advance to this point before it could be made. It's not the first portable hand-held gaming system on the market; there have been a number over the past few decades. But unlike the others, this is a full-fledged computer running a Linux-based operating system, which means it will run tens of thousands of games out of the box (including those from other systems via emulation). It's tightly integrated with Steam, which meant that upon starting it up and logging into my account my entire gaming library was available to download and play (though not everything works well just yet, as a lot of games don't have great controller support and have to use the trackpads for mouse emulation).

Take it outside and get some fresh air! (Though I wouldn't play in full sun. Also hand for scale.)

Anyway, this is the device I wished I had on every interminable, cramped, awkward flight I've ever been on. I've tried gaming on flights with laptops in the past, but laptops are a very imperfect solution to the problem of taking your PC games on the go. They're unwieldy in the confines of a tiny airline seat, and since they're general purpose devices you're wasting a lot of battery power on things superfluous to running your game. Ultimately, it was not a fun experience nor one I repeated more than once or twice. I'm still not looking forward to whenever I have to fly next, but at least I'll have something to help mitigate the misery now. 

Beyond future flight speculations, I've also found the Deck to be quite nice as a way to play games other than at my desk. This surprised me, since I've never thought of gaming at my desk as arduous, but it turns out to be really nice to game on the couch, or on my bed, or even (gasp!) outdoors. 3D games tend to sap the battery pretty quickly and I wouldn't generally play them on the Deck (I do still have a beefy PC for that), but smaller 2D games (of which I have a fair number) work quite well and many can be played for upwards of 6 hours (long enough to get me from Hawaii to the mainland or vice versa).

There's a lot more to the Deck that I haven't mentioned (like how it has a microSD card slot that you can put games on for effectively unlimited extra storage), but other people have covered it better than me by now, and honestly if you're reading this you probably already know if you want one or not. (Though I'll try to answer any questions people might have.) I've had it for a little over four weeks now, and I've really enjoyed having it around to pick up and play something for a short burst, or to do so away from my desk. I'm looking forward to years more enjoyment out of it (and some flights rendered less of an awful experience), and as it's getting late here I think I'll go do a little gaming in bed before hitting the hay. A hui hou!

Research recap, or: why I haven't had time to post this month

It's been pretty quiet on the blog front here this month, though not because things have been quiet for me. I realize now that I never mentioned it, but around the end of May (right when I had COVID-19) I received referee reports for the two papers I'd submitted back at the beginning of April (which contain basically all the work from my PhD project). After recovering from COVID I started working on making changes and writing our responses to the referees (one for each paper) at a leisurely pace. While I was certainly intending to be faster than the six-month deadline, I also wasn't in huge rush during the few-week recovery period where I still felt less able to concentrate or think hard. (Especially in the evenings after a full day of working my day job!)

At least, I wasn't in a rush until a few weeks ago. See, in addition to my two papers, there was a third (primarily written by my advisor but with all of us in my research group as co-authors) which we had submitted to the journal Science, with the intention that all three would come out at the same time. (If you don't know, Science is one of the two premier journals [along with Nature] in the physical sciences, so it being published there would be a big deal for our combined research.) Around the beginning of July we finally got the referee reports back for that paper, which were…mixed. Two out of three recommended the paper be published, while the third had some reservations and didn't recommend it for publication. One of their sticking points was that the Science paper relied on my papers for further details, and my papers hadn't been accepted for publication yet. Fortunately, the editor at Science in charge of our paper was inclined towards the two favorable reviewers, and after some back-and-forth indicated that my papers being accepted would go a long way towards resolving the unfavorable reviewer's qualms and help tip the balance in favor of our Science paper being accepted.

This had the immediate effect of turning my sedate response-generation process into a mad-cap dash to get the responses to the referees back and the papers accepted. In some good news, the changes needed for my second paper were quite minimal, I was able to submit it last week, and a day later I got the news that it was accepted for publication. Which is a big milestone, considering it's the first paper I've written that's been accepted; it's also the one which the Science paper primarily references, so its acceptance means that paper can move along as well. I've had no time to rest on my laurels, however, since my first paper still needs editing, and in order to have all three papers come out together it'd be good to get it resubmitted and (hopefully) accepted as soon as possible. So my free time has been in pretty short supply so far this month, as the first paper had a lot more comments to reply to than the second. That doesn't mean I haven't done anything else (I still have to rest and recuperate sometime), and I'm looking forward to sharing some of what I've been up to in future posts. (I originally meant this post to be about something different, but realized I needed to explain what I've been up to first.) But if those posts aren't immediately forthcoming, well, you'll know why. I'm optimistically projecting I'll be done with the first paper response by sometime next week, and then hopefully I'll once again have more free time on my hands. But we'll see! A hui hou!

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!

Laupāhoehoe Point, aerial edition

Yesterday morning I visited Laupāhoehoe Point  with a photographer friend of mine. I'd told him about getting a drone, and he suggested an outing wheret I could fly my drone to get some photos and he could get some photos of it (and me) in action. I last visited Laupāhoehoe Beach Park back in 2015, but it was pretty much the same as I remembered.

This shot is back up the gulch we drove down into to reach the point.

Laupāhoehoe Point sits at the end of a gulch, a little spit of land jutting into the Pacific in stark contrast to the sea cliffs on either side. Both times I've been it was beautifully sunny weather with a few clouds, and a strong wind blowing off the ocean. This was actually the windiest I've taken my drone up, so I was a bit worried it'd encounter some problems. Luckily, the Mini 3 can handle surprisingly strong winds—while it was definitely buffeted about a bit, I was never worried that it wasn't going to be able to make it flying against the wind or anything like that.

Panorama at Laupāhoehoe Point. Click for a larger view.

Though, due to the wind I didn't fly quite as high as I might otherwise have. I got this nice panorama looking out to sea from about 50 meters up (of the 120 m I could've gone). The drone-generated panorama had some visible glitches in the horizon (probably from the aforementioned-buffeting), but I saved the raw photos and was able to get this lovely panorama out of Hugin. I got it at a good time; the wind was intermittently blowing clouds overhead, and I was surprised to see, upon reviewing the photos, just how washed out and dull the ones in the shade looked compared to the one in full sunlight. (You can see this in the top photo, actually, though the valley further back in the center was still unshadowed.) It doesn't show in the panorama due to the distortion, but those sea-cliffs to either side of the point run basically straight from north-west to south-east.

It was a fun trip, and is the farthest I've gone yet for drone flying (it's about 40 minutes out from Hilo). Interestingly, while my original intent with getting a drone was simply getting aerial photos and videos, I'm finding that I'm coming to enjoy the simple act of flying at least as much. I'm excited to go out and fly, even in places I've explored before or where I don't end up taking many photos. It's a new experience, but I think I finally have a proper outdoor hobby. So expect more aerial photos (and videos) in future! A hui hou!