Well here it is, 2018's just about over and 2019's just around the corner. A year spent in Australia, a year spent below the equator—and now that I'm west of the international date line instead of east I get to welcome the new year before most of the world instead of after it. (Which means this post is going to go up the day before for people in the U.S. Oh well. That's time zones for you.)
And I'm off to a New Year's party now, so see you all in 2019! Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou!
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
A Christmas Eve Astrobite
I've put up a final post on Astrobites this year, on Christmas Eve, of all days! Especially after posting one on Thanksgiving. This is actually the post I wanted to write for Thanksgiving, but time constraints and the fact I already had one half-written changed that.
This paper is about how our Sun is so incredibly stable in brightness over time compared to other stars. In fact, its variability is so much lower than other stars that it's been a long-standing puzzle in solar physics. To explain it briefly, the authors of the paper I wrote about did some simulations of Sun-like stars while varying a few key parameters such as the proportion of elements besides hydrogen and helium and the star's effective temperature. What they found is that the Sun sits in a very special place in phase-space where it ends up being almost perfectly constant in brightness over the course of its solar magnetic cycle. Changing the metallicity or temperature by extremely small amounts (relatively speaking)—in any direction—causes the variability over a star's magnetic cycle to shoot up dramatically.
(The mechanism I thought was pretty interesting: magnetic activity in stars causes two types of phenomena, starspots which are darker than average, and faculae which are brighter than average. Most stars are dominated by one or the other over the course of a magnetic cycle which changes their brightness, but the Sun's parameters cause the relative numbers of sunspots and faculae to almost perfectly balance in such a way that its average power output as seen from Earth is almost constant.)
This is actually final astrobite as a scheduled author; going into my second year of my PhD I've decided to retire from the active rotation to be able to focus more on my research. However, I'm not done writing just yet! I'll be able to write posts for the queue, and I still intend to, which just means I won't know when they'll go out. I no longer need to write one every month or so, so the number may go up or down depending on how many interesting papers I come across. Honestly, that's the part I'm looking forward to the most: some of my posts were on papers I found genuinely fascinating and loved explaining and I'm really proud of them, while a few of them were written just because I had a deadline and were themost interesting least boring papers I could find recently. Being able to write only when I'm really motivated (kinda like I do here…) is quite an exciting prospect!
I feel like that may have ended up more melancholy than I intended, so how about some Christmas presents? For the featured image for my posts I used the painting below, which I painted last Thursday as a present for my adviser:
(Unfortunately I miscalculated when he was going on vacation so he'll find it when he gets back in January, I guess. Some of my friends were ribbing me that I'm setting unrealistically high expectations for the other students now!)
Painting a star turned out to be so much fun that I painted another one the next night, a pulsar for my associate adviser:
Ignore the ugly shadow cast by my easel at the top of the picture. Which, I realized, I haven't mentioned yet, so yes, I bought an easel! I feel like a real artist now. An easel makes painting so much easier. I picked one that's quite portable and folds up nicely so I can bring it home (as I've done over the break, along with my painting supplies). It's sitting in the corner with my current work on it, and I must say, an easel with a painting in progress on it really classes up the room it's in!
Anyway, that's enough for tonight. Merry Christmas everyone, and I hope to be back with some more posts soon now that I'm on vacation.
This paper is about how our Sun is so incredibly stable in brightness over time compared to other stars. In fact, its variability is so much lower than other stars that it's been a long-standing puzzle in solar physics. To explain it briefly, the authors of the paper I wrote about did some simulations of Sun-like stars while varying a few key parameters such as the proportion of elements besides hydrogen and helium and the star's effective temperature. What they found is that the Sun sits in a very special place in phase-space where it ends up being almost perfectly constant in brightness over the course of its solar magnetic cycle. Changing the metallicity or temperature by extremely small amounts (relatively speaking)—in any direction—causes the variability over a star's magnetic cycle to shoot up dramatically.
(The mechanism I thought was pretty interesting: magnetic activity in stars causes two types of phenomena, starspots which are darker than average, and faculae which are brighter than average. Most stars are dominated by one or the other over the course of a magnetic cycle which changes their brightness, but the Sun's parameters cause the relative numbers of sunspots and faculae to almost perfectly balance in such a way that its average power output as seen from Earth is almost constant.)
This is actually final astrobite as a scheduled author; going into my second year of my PhD I've decided to retire from the active rotation to be able to focus more on my research. However, I'm not done writing just yet! I'll be able to write posts for the queue, and I still intend to, which just means I won't know when they'll go out. I no longer need to write one every month or so, so the number may go up or down depending on how many interesting papers I come across. Honestly, that's the part I'm looking forward to the most: some of my posts were on papers I found genuinely fascinating and loved explaining and I'm really proud of them, while a few of them were written just because I had a deadline and were the
I feel like that may have ended up more melancholy than I intended, so how about some Christmas presents? For the featured image for my posts I used the painting below, which I painted last Thursday as a present for my adviser:
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| “A Solar Twin,” by me. |
Painting a star turned out to be so much fun that I painted another one the next night, a pulsar for my associate adviser:
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| “A Pulsar,” also by me. |
Anyway, that's enough for tonight. Merry Christmas everyone, and I hope to be back with some more posts soon now that I'm on vacation.
Monday, December 17, 2018
A December Update
It's been pretty quiet on the ol’ blog front this month—for a few reasons—but I'm hopeful that'll change in the next week or so. First off, I got sick last weekend, which laid me out for almost a week. Then, I've been struggling with a lot of instability in my computer the past few months, which I finally tracked down to one of my RAM modules starting to fail. I found and removed it last weekend, and my computer's been nice and stable again since. And finally, I've just been busy with numerous things as the end of the year rolls around.
This is the last week before the Christmas break begins, and I'll be taking a few weeks off after that, so I'm hoping that starting this weekend I can finally start working on some of the many creative projects rattling around in my head that have been accruing the last few months. And that'll likely lead to some new blog posts, so the second half of December should be a little livelier than the first half has been so far. Blender just came out with a huge new update that radically overhauls the interface to make it simpler and more intuitive, and I'm interested in checking it out to see how it's changed. Plus I've got plenty of other ideas for projects to do. A hui hou!
This is the last week before the Christmas break begins, and I'll be taking a few weeks off after that, so I'm hoping that starting this weekend I can finally start working on some of the many creative projects rattling around in my head that have been accruing the last few months. And that'll likely lead to some new blog posts, so the second half of December should be a little livelier than the first half has been so far. Blender just came out with a huge new update that radically overhauls the interface to make it simpler and more intuitive, and I'm interested in checking it out to see how it's changed. Plus I've got plenty of other ideas for projects to do. A hui hou!
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Moon-painting
I've finished my second painting project, a picture of the waxing crescent Moon illuminated by Earthshine. This one only took about a month, compared to my first one which took three, for a few reasons:
I only have one in-progress photo for this one; partly I forgot to take more, partly I chose not to because there often weren't significant differences between painting sessions.
Here it is in progress, after two sessions; the first one I painted the sunlit side and maria (dark lava plains) there, and the second I started filling in the dark side highlands. It was interesting doing this one because I used a very restricted palette; white, black, gray, and one or two different types of blue.
And here's the finished product. I think this one looks a bit better from a distance, hence the wider shot of it hanging up in my kitchen. (The house I'm living in, very conveniently, has a ton of ready-made hooks for hanging things all over the walls.)
North is up in the painting so this is roughly how it'd look in the northern hemisphere, partly because I'm used to seeing it that way and partly because that's how the photo I painted it from looked. But you could easily flip it upside down to have a southern hemisphere view.
Anyway, it was a fun project, and interesting to paint with a restricted range of colors. I've already got several ideas in my head for future paintings, so we'll see which ones come to fruition first. Two weeks ago I discovered that the local art shop (where I'm now on a first-name basis with several of the employees) sells little 8×10 inch canvases by the 10-pack, so I've picked up one of those and have some Christmas presents to start painting… A hui hou!
- This one is only 40x40 cm rather than 80x80 cm, or a quarter of the size of the first one.
- It uses a much more restricted palette (number of colors), mostly because:
- It's based on an actual astrophoto someone else took that I used as reference.
I only have one in-progress photo for this one; partly I forgot to take more, partly I chose not to because there often weren't significant differences between painting sessions.
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| You may be able to pick out, in the still un-painted areas, the pencil marks I sketched as a guide. |
And here's the finished product. I think this one looks a bit better from a distance, hence the wider shot of it hanging up in my kitchen. (The house I'm living in, very conveniently, has a ton of ready-made hooks for hanging things all over the walls.)
North is up in the painting so this is roughly how it'd look in the northern hemisphere, partly because I'm used to seeing it that way and partly because that's how the photo I painted it from looked. But you could easily flip it upside down to have a southern hemisphere view.
Anyway, it was a fun project, and interesting to paint with a restricted range of colors. I've already got several ideas in my head for future paintings, so we'll see which ones come to fruition first. Two weeks ago I discovered that the local art shop (where I'm now on a first-name basis with several of the employees) sells little 8×10 inch canvases by the 10-pack, so I've picked up one of those and have some Christmas presents to start painting… A hui hou!
Saturday, November 24, 2018
A Thanksgiving Astrobite!
In a funny coincidence, when the latest three-month schedule for Astrobites was put together I ended up being scheduled for both Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. I got my Thanksgiving post up two days ago, and amusingly the title (“Mirach’s Ghost and Mirach’s Goblin: A New Galaxy Found Near the Local Group”) sounds a bit like I mis-scheduled a post intended for Halloween.
I'd actually intended to write this post for the queue and write about a different paper for my scheduled Thanksgiving post, but I ended up being extremely busy this week (details below) and since I'd already started working on this post I ended up using it instead. Oh well. Maybe I'll write the other one up for the queue. The paper I ended up writing about is fascinating in its own right, about the discovery of a new, extremely faint dwarf galaxy just beyond the boundary of the Local Group.
The reason I was so busy this week is that I was attending SciCoder 2018, an intensive week-long workshop in scientific programming. This was, however, an almost-literally last-minute decision, as the course had filled up so quickly upon being announced a few months ago that I only made it on the waiting list (and knew there was at least one other person who was on it ahead of me). Sunday night at about 7:30 PM I got an email from the conference organizer letting me know there was an opening and asking if I wanted to attend, and after half an hour or so of working out just how much that would impact my week I accepted.
And when I say intensive, it was just that; 9 to 5 each day (or 8:30 on the first day), at the University of Melbourne (necessitating an hour of train and tram travel for me each way), and throughout a veritable avalanche of information. I was fortunate to already have some familiarity with some of the concepts presented, and even I left each evening feeling like I'd just spent the day doing the mental equivalent of drinking out of a fire hose. It was good, don't get me wrong, but also quite exhausting.
Somehow during the week I also managed to squeeze out enough time (not that it took much) to work on a little personal project: Astrobites has had an offer, through its parent association the American Astronomical Society, for a logo revamp by a professional design firm. In place of the current logo which uses a photograph of Mars (with a bite taken out of it), one of the concepts they've provided was a stylized representation of Mars (with a bite taken out of it).
I'm a huge sucker for stylized representations of things, and liked the general idea, but there were a few details of the proposal that I wasn't 100% satisfied with so I quickly made a slightly different version of my own based on their template to illustrate the shortcomings I saw…and then had a fanciful idea to make a whole solar system of stylized-planets-with-bites-out for logos. I've got enough experience with Inkscape now that it only took me an hour or two, and I really like how it came out (as did a few fellow students when I showed them).
At this point I've changed Mars enough that the only thing I'm really copying from the proposal is the “bite and crumbs” motif each planet has. I doubt these will show up in an official capacity, so I thought I'd show them off here as a personal project. That's it for today though, I need to go catch up on my sleep now. A hui hou!
I'd actually intended to write this post for the queue and write about a different paper for my scheduled Thanksgiving post, but I ended up being extremely busy this week (details below) and since I'd already started working on this post I ended up using it instead. Oh well. Maybe I'll write the other one up for the queue. The paper I ended up writing about is fascinating in its own right, about the discovery of a new, extremely faint dwarf galaxy just beyond the boundary of the Local Group.
The reason I was so busy this week is that I was attending SciCoder 2018, an intensive week-long workshop in scientific programming. This was, however, an almost-literally last-minute decision, as the course had filled up so quickly upon being announced a few months ago that I only made it on the waiting list (and knew there was at least one other person who was on it ahead of me). Sunday night at about 7:30 PM I got an email from the conference organizer letting me know there was an opening and asking if I wanted to attend, and after half an hour or so of working out just how much that would impact my week I accepted.
And when I say intensive, it was just that; 9 to 5 each day (or 8:30 on the first day), at the University of Melbourne (necessitating an hour of train and tram travel for me each way), and throughout a veritable avalanche of information. I was fortunate to already have some familiarity with some of the concepts presented, and even I left each evening feeling like I'd just spent the day doing the mental equivalent of drinking out of a fire hose. It was good, don't get me wrong, but also quite exhausting.
Somehow during the week I also managed to squeeze out enough time (not that it took much) to work on a little personal project: Astrobites has had an offer, through its parent association the American Astronomical Society, for a logo revamp by a professional design firm. In place of the current logo which uses a photograph of Mars (with a bite taken out of it), one of the concepts they've provided was a stylized representation of Mars (with a bite taken out of it).
I'm a huge sucker for stylized representations of things, and liked the general idea, but there were a few details of the proposal that I wasn't 100% satisfied with so I quickly made a slightly different version of my own based on their template to illustrate the shortcomings I saw…and then had a fanciful idea to make a whole solar system of stylized-planets-with-bites-out for logos. I've got enough experience with Inkscape now that it only took me an hour or two, and I really like how it came out (as did a few fellow students when I showed them).
At this point I've changed Mars enough that the only thing I'm really copying from the proposal is the “bite and crumbs” motif each planet has. I doubt these will show up in an official capacity, so I thought I'd show them off here as a personal project. That's it for today though, I need to go catch up on my sleep now. A hui hou!
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Personal Panoramic History, Part 8: 2015
Previously in this series of posts, covering 2014, I had some panoramas from the top of Mauna Kea to where it disappears into the ocean. In contrast, 2015 might just be The Year of Ocean Panoramas…
In March of 2015 my friend Graham and I went for a hike at a little forest reserve up the Hāmākua coast called Kalōpā State Recreation Area, and while I didn't get any good panorama opportunities in the forest, on the way we stopped at Laupāhoehoe Point, a little spit of land sticking out of the craggy coast where you can access the ocean.
It's a lovely area, and we had some spectacular weather for the visit; being on the windward side of the island it's likely clouded over or raining much of the time.
Interestingly I don't remember exactly what this trip was. I know the location: it's at the top of the steep cliffs (pali) between Kīlauea and the ocean, yet I don't remember why Graham and I came there or what we did for the rest of the trip, since these are almost the only photos I have from that day. We'd come earlier in the month to see the lava lake in Kīlauea, but here we were apparently just hiking? Apparently we didn't go to Kīlauea Iki or anything else like that, or I would've gotten photos of it. I think we stopped near here to have lunch, or something like that. It is a mystery.
Regardless, this panorama definitely hasn't been shown before. I vaguely remember of that trip that there was a lot of poor weather around; you can see that on both sides of the picture there are dark storm clouds, but we were lucky to have clear skies above us when this was taken.
I don't actually have any panoramas specifically from June, but that month I noticed that panoramas make great desktop wallpaper for a dual-monitor display, and it could almost be considered the point where I realized that I'd been doing them for a while and started to get more intentional (albeit slowly) about looking for panorama opportunities.
July, however, has several panoramas due to my mother's side of the family having a reunion in Oregon which I attended. We stayed right on the beach and explored a few locations up and down the coast as well.
This panorama and the next were taken relatively close to each other, the first looking north, the second looking south along the coast. The first and third of this series of four have shown up before on this blog, but the second and fourth are new, as I only put their constituent photos together into a panorama with Hugin.
I'm not sure why I never put these photos into a panorama, but my guess would be that due to the Sun's strong reflections in the middle of the scene the color correction would've been beyond my skill to do manually. Luckily, Hugin handles varying color composition throughout a panorama quite nicely and can compensate for it automatically to a pretty good extent.
These two panoramas above and below show Simpson's Reef; the lower one just from a slightly wider angle, which is likely why I never bothered putting it together after creating the first one.
I don't remember much about the reef from the little informational placard that was posted by the lookout, but I remember that the largest island in it was almost completely covered in sea lions (though they're hard to make out at this scale).
And that's it for 2015! A fairly slow year in terms of quantity, but some pretty nice panoramas. Looking ahead, 2016 will be similarly slow, but it's got some interesting ones that I haven't shown off before. A hui hou!
March
In March of 2015 my friend Graham and I went for a hike at a little forest reserve up the Hāmākua coast called Kalōpā State Recreation Area, and while I didn't get any good panorama opportunities in the forest, on the way we stopped at Laupāhoehoe Point, a little spit of land sticking out of the craggy coast where you can access the ocean.
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| View looking east-south-east along the Hāmākua coast. |
May
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| Nā Pali cliffs, near Kīlauea, looking south-east. |
Regardless, this panorama definitely hasn't been shown before. I vaguely remember of that trip that there was a lot of poor weather around; you can see that on both sides of the picture there are dark storm clouds, but we were lucky to have clear skies above us when this was taken.
June
I don't actually have any panoramas specifically from June, but that month I noticed that panoramas make great desktop wallpaper for a dual-monitor display, and it could almost be considered the point where I realized that I'd been doing them for a while and started to get more intentional (albeit slowly) about looking for panorama opportunities.
July
July, however, has several panoramas due to my mother's side of the family having a reunion in Oregon which I attended. We stayed right on the beach and explored a few locations up and down the coast as well.
This panorama and the next were taken relatively close to each other, the first looking north, the second looking south along the coast. The first and third of this series of four have shown up before on this blog, but the second and fourth are new, as I only put their constituent photos together into a panorama with Hugin.
I'm not sure why I never put these photos into a panorama, but my guess would be that due to the Sun's strong reflections in the middle of the scene the color correction would've been beyond my skill to do manually. Luckily, Hugin handles varying color composition throughout a panorama quite nicely and can compensate for it automatically to a pretty good extent.
These two panoramas above and below show Simpson's Reef; the lower one just from a slightly wider angle, which is likely why I never bothered putting it together after creating the first one.
I don't remember much about the reef from the little informational placard that was posted by the lookout, but I remember that the largest island in it was almost completely covered in sea lions (though they're hard to make out at this scale).
And that's it for 2015! A fairly slow year in terms of quantity, but some pretty nice panoramas. Looking ahead, 2016 will be similarly slow, but it's got some interesting ones that I haven't shown off before. A hui hou!
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Painting a Volcano Is Like Making a Volcano: Layers Upon Layers
Last month I teased a project I've been working on for a while, and having finished it this week I'm finally ready to reveal it:
I've taken up painting (with acrylics)! And I've finished my first painting!
I mused about taking up painting in this post back in June, having found the experience of painting my YTLA model at the beginning of the year to be very soothing and enjoyable. Back in August we restarted our weekly art workshops at Swinburne with our artists-in-residence Pam and Carolyn, and I decided to go for it—and I'm ultimately really glad I did, as I've found it to be incredibly rewarding.
For my first painting, I wanted to paint a picture that I've had in my head since at least 2012, back when I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. It was inspired by my reading about how Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa used to host year-round glacial ice caps, and also erupted underneath those glaciers. A picture came into my mind of the summit of Mauna Kea, snow-clad, looking south towards Mauna Loa similarly covered in ice, at night with the (northern hemisphere) summer Milky Way rising majestically above while a fountain of lava erupts from Mauna Kea's summit through a crack in the ice.
I'd originally wanted to do this using Blender, like some previous projects of mine, but I just never got around to it after I started working full time so I decided I'd try doing it as my first painting project. Probably far too ambitious for a beginner like me, but you can judge how it turned out for yourself. Since I enjoy seeing the creative process I took a bunch of photos throughout the entire three-month creation period, so you can watch the entire process as it unfolded.
Here it is, my first swatch of paint applied to canvas, August 21, 2018. (Though I also spent two weeks before this applying two coats of gesso—essentially a primer layer of white paint mixed with chalk which serves as a good base for future paint layers.) Not much to look at yet, but you can see the outline of Mauna Loa and Hualālai (on the right) starting to take shape already. There's a curious thrill of trepidation that comes when holding a loaded paintbrush poised over a blank canvas; the feeling of permanence and lack of an undo option combine to make it a bit nerve-wracking even when doing nothing more complicated than a flat black night sky!
Next, I added the glacier atop Mauna Loa. The glaciers were probably the most difficult part of this project for me, as I've never seen one personally so I had to rely on photos and my own ideas of how ice looks. I think this one atop Mauna Loa came out pretty well, at least.
Of course, even personal familiarity with a subject doesn't guarantee I'll paint it well. I painted a lot of the early stages from my mental picture without reference photos, and I definitely could've done a better job with the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai with some visual references. Still, this session was interesting for mixing a few different colors to play with. I'm not using pretty much any colors straight from the tube (other than the black background, and maybe some of that gray), rather I'm mixing them to start to get a grip on color mixing theory as it applies to acrylic paint.
Moving into September I finished off the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai. I mixed even more shades of colors this time and started layering them over older ones, which led me to the striking realization that making a volcano and painting a volcano are very similar processes; just layers upon layers!
Almost immediately upon actually putting paint to canvas at the beginning I realized I was enjoying the process far too much to wait for weekly workshop sessions, so I quickly started working on my own throughout the week. I had a short time available for this session so I added a cloud on the left approaching from the east and crossing the Saddle. (Spoilers: I wasn't happy with it almost immediately upon finishing it, so it'll change later.)
Next session, I tackled the snow-covered summit of Mauna Kea in the foreground. A sharp-eyed inspection of this photo will reveal that it's upside-down, as I rotated the canvas on the easel so that I could paint along the bottom edge of it. It turned out to be an interesting artistic exercise, actually; I painted the smaller cinder cone on the left entirely upside-down, and am still happy with how it came out. I wasn't very happy with the glacier as a whole though, so you'll see it getting reworked.
Case in point: here I've gone over most of the foreground to try to both merge it more naturally from side to side and also introduce some feeling of contours to help define the shape. The cinder cones got some working over, too. They're actually based on real cinder cones still extant at the summit, though I didn't copy them particularly closely. The large one on the left is Puʻu Wēkiu, the eastern rim of which is today the highest point on Mauna Kea; the one behind it is Puʻu Haukea, a relatively recent cinder cone going by its not-yet-significantly-weathered dark gray color; and the one on the right is Puʻu Poliʻahu, named after one of the Hawaiian goddesses of snow. It's very close to the present-day location of the JCMT, and has a much more weathered and irregular profile now than I've painted it here.
At this point I finally started looking up references for what Mauna Kea looked like when snow-covered nowadays, and realized that photos usually showed black rocks sticking out from the snow, especially around rims and ridges. I went a little overboard with it here (and dialed it back later), but I think it definitely helps to define parts of the space better.
I was never entirely happy with the cloud I'd added, nor the center part of the foreground glacier, so in one session I redid both of them. I think it was around now that I started realizing that the composition didn't really have space for a lava fountain like I'd originally intended, but I was still on the fence about including one eventually at this point.
Instead, I decided to expand! Pam encouraged me to add a second canvas to the sky to better capture the Milky Way, and I'm really glad I took her advice. Actually painting the Milky Way was an interesting and exhausting process, as I did it by spattering paint on the canvas to make stars. (I blocked off the foreground beforehand so it wouldn't be affected.) In what's turning out to be a recurring theme, I wasn't happy with the initial look of it and spent a few sessions reworking it…
Coming into October, I went back and spattered more stars on the canvas, though I made the same mistake as before and tried to paint in the Milky Way's dust lanes from my head rather than from a reference. You might have noticed that the quality of these photos, especially regarding glare, changes a lot; it depended on if I took them in the evening after working on them under electric light, or in the morning the next day when there was daylight. Large expanses of black like the night sky here were especially difficult to properly represent the darkness of.
It's not easy to see in the photo, but I've gone and hand-painted in all the brightest stars that one could reasonably see with the naked eye based on the perspective and time of year. The center of the Milky Way roughly coincides with the center of the top canvas, so Sagittarius, Scorpius, and Corona Australis are all visible, with a bit of Lupus on the right and a few other constellations having one or two stars appearing. And being the stickler that I am, I actually painted them with colors corresponding to their spectral types. This session turned out to be surprisingly grueling, trying to put the stars in the right places based on a star map using Stellarium. I also added a few nebulae as well; the largest pink patch near the center is the Lagoon Nebula, while just above it is the Trifid Nebula. You can also see that I've subtly whited out bits of the black rims of the cinder cones to make them blend in a bit more.
I was worried that the hand-painted stars wouldn't stand out all the much from the background splatter stars, until a few days later when I noticed an interesting thing: up close to the canvas you can see all the faint background stars, but step back a few paces and it all disappears into the blackness of the night, leaving the hand-painted stars as the only ones to be seen! I definitely didn't plan that, but it works really well, and is an interesting lesson in how a painting can be seen differently at different distances; a dynamic I hadn't really appreciated from my previous experience doing artwork on a computer where you generally only look at something from a fairly fixed, nearby distance.
Finally, in one mammoth two-and-a-half-hour session I went over the Milky Way again by hand, adding gossamer stars clouds and actual dust lanes from reference photos. I spent so long looking at the Milky Way, in fact, that I now immediately recognize structures in the dust lanes in other photos from having painted them. There are still some factually incorrect dust lanes in there, but it's much more realistic now. And at this point I realized that I was satisfied with it. I could keep tinkering with it and adding more details, but I was also fine with calling it finished (I also finally decided against adding any eruption activity). I did one last session on Pam's suggestion to add a bit more color to reflect the color of the Milky Way in the ice and to push Mauna Loa more into the background, and the result is:
My first painting is complete! I varnished it just this week. The lighting on this photo is, once again, pretty terrible, but it gives a decent idea of what it's like. Together the two canvases are 80×80 centimeters (31×31 inches), so it's reasonably large. I call it “Mauna Kea a me Mauna Loa ma lalo o ka lani hōkū (Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa beneath the starry heavens).”
It feels amazing to have finally finished it, and I've received lots of nice comments on it from people. I've really dived into painting, as I've found it to be way more fun and engaging than I had expected. I've picked up a number of tubes of paint and brushes, and even a palette knife which looks like a tiny trowel and reminds me of doing archaeology! I've been reading up on techniques and painting terms, and checking out the paintings of famous painters with a new eye. (I'm thankful for a decent amount of art history in my education, but I'm learning there are so many painters I've never even heard of!)
Now that I've finally cleared that picture from my head I find another one has arisen to take its place. People have also given me some ideas for others (like a series of planetary landscapes around the solar system), so we'll see what comes next. But one thing's for sure: I expect this to be a hobby for years to come. A hui hou!
I've taken up painting (with acrylics)! And I've finished my first painting!
I mused about taking up painting in this post back in June, having found the experience of painting my YTLA model at the beginning of the year to be very soothing and enjoyable. Back in August we restarted our weekly art workshops at Swinburne with our artists-in-residence Pam and Carolyn, and I decided to go for it—and I'm ultimately really glad I did, as I've found it to be incredibly rewarding.
For my first painting, I wanted to paint a picture that I've had in my head since at least 2012, back when I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. It was inspired by my reading about how Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa used to host year-round glacial ice caps, and also erupted underneath those glaciers. A picture came into my mind of the summit of Mauna Kea, snow-clad, looking south towards Mauna Loa similarly covered in ice, at night with the (northern hemisphere) summer Milky Way rising majestically above while a fountain of lava erupts from Mauna Kea's summit through a crack in the ice.
I'd originally wanted to do this using Blender, like some previous projects of mine, but I just never got around to it after I started working full time so I decided I'd try doing it as my first painting project. Probably far too ambitious for a beginner like me, but you can judge how it turned out for yourself. Since I enjoy seeing the creative process I took a bunch of photos throughout the entire three-month creation period, so you can watch the entire process as it unfolded.
Here it is, my first swatch of paint applied to canvas, August 21, 2018. (Though I also spent two weeks before this applying two coats of gesso—essentially a primer layer of white paint mixed with chalk which serves as a good base for future paint layers.) Not much to look at yet, but you can see the outline of Mauna Loa and Hualālai (on the right) starting to take shape already. There's a curious thrill of trepidation that comes when holding a loaded paintbrush poised over a blank canvas; the feeling of permanence and lack of an undo option combine to make it a bit nerve-wracking even when doing nothing more complicated than a flat black night sky!
Next, I added the glacier atop Mauna Loa. The glaciers were probably the most difficult part of this project for me, as I've never seen one personally so I had to rely on photos and my own ideas of how ice looks. I think this one atop Mauna Loa came out pretty well, at least.
Of course, even personal familiarity with a subject doesn't guarantee I'll paint it well. I painted a lot of the early stages from my mental picture without reference photos, and I definitely could've done a better job with the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai with some visual references. Still, this session was interesting for mixing a few different colors to play with. I'm not using pretty much any colors straight from the tube (other than the black background, and maybe some of that gray), rather I'm mixing them to start to get a grip on color mixing theory as it applies to acrylic paint.
Moving into September I finished off the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai. I mixed even more shades of colors this time and started layering them over older ones, which led me to the striking realization that making a volcano and painting a volcano are very similar processes; just layers upon layers!
Almost immediately upon actually putting paint to canvas at the beginning I realized I was enjoying the process far too much to wait for weekly workshop sessions, so I quickly started working on my own throughout the week. I had a short time available for this session so I added a cloud on the left approaching from the east and crossing the Saddle. (Spoilers: I wasn't happy with it almost immediately upon finishing it, so it'll change later.)
Next session, I tackled the snow-covered summit of Mauna Kea in the foreground. A sharp-eyed inspection of this photo will reveal that it's upside-down, as I rotated the canvas on the easel so that I could paint along the bottom edge of it. It turned out to be an interesting artistic exercise, actually; I painted the smaller cinder cone on the left entirely upside-down, and am still happy with how it came out. I wasn't very happy with the glacier as a whole though, so you'll see it getting reworked.
Case in point: here I've gone over most of the foreground to try to both merge it more naturally from side to side and also introduce some feeling of contours to help define the shape. The cinder cones got some working over, too. They're actually based on real cinder cones still extant at the summit, though I didn't copy them particularly closely. The large one on the left is Puʻu Wēkiu, the eastern rim of which is today the highest point on Mauna Kea; the one behind it is Puʻu Haukea, a relatively recent cinder cone going by its not-yet-significantly-weathered dark gray color; and the one on the right is Puʻu Poliʻahu, named after one of the Hawaiian goddesses of snow. It's very close to the present-day location of the JCMT, and has a much more weathered and irregular profile now than I've painted it here.
At this point I finally started looking up references for what Mauna Kea looked like when snow-covered nowadays, and realized that photos usually showed black rocks sticking out from the snow, especially around rims and ridges. I went a little overboard with it here (and dialed it back later), but I think it definitely helps to define parts of the space better.
I was never entirely happy with the cloud I'd added, nor the center part of the foreground glacier, so in one session I redid both of them. I think it was around now that I started realizing that the composition didn't really have space for a lava fountain like I'd originally intended, but I was still on the fence about including one eventually at this point.
Instead, I decided to expand! Pam encouraged me to add a second canvas to the sky to better capture the Milky Way, and I'm really glad I took her advice. Actually painting the Milky Way was an interesting and exhausting process, as I did it by spattering paint on the canvas to make stars. (I blocked off the foreground beforehand so it wouldn't be affected.) In what's turning out to be a recurring theme, I wasn't happy with the initial look of it and spent a few sessions reworking it…
Coming into October, I went back and spattered more stars on the canvas, though I made the same mistake as before and tried to paint in the Milky Way's dust lanes from my head rather than from a reference. You might have noticed that the quality of these photos, especially regarding glare, changes a lot; it depended on if I took them in the evening after working on them under electric light, or in the morning the next day when there was daylight. Large expanses of black like the night sky here were especially difficult to properly represent the darkness of.
It's not easy to see in the photo, but I've gone and hand-painted in all the brightest stars that one could reasonably see with the naked eye based on the perspective and time of year. The center of the Milky Way roughly coincides with the center of the top canvas, so Sagittarius, Scorpius, and Corona Australis are all visible, with a bit of Lupus on the right and a few other constellations having one or two stars appearing. And being the stickler that I am, I actually painted them with colors corresponding to their spectral types. This session turned out to be surprisingly grueling, trying to put the stars in the right places based on a star map using Stellarium. I also added a few nebulae as well; the largest pink patch near the center is the Lagoon Nebula, while just above it is the Trifid Nebula. You can also see that I've subtly whited out bits of the black rims of the cinder cones to make them blend in a bit more.
I was worried that the hand-painted stars wouldn't stand out all the much from the background splatter stars, until a few days later when I noticed an interesting thing: up close to the canvas you can see all the faint background stars, but step back a few paces and it all disappears into the blackness of the night, leaving the hand-painted stars as the only ones to be seen! I definitely didn't plan that, but it works really well, and is an interesting lesson in how a painting can be seen differently at different distances; a dynamic I hadn't really appreciated from my previous experience doing artwork on a computer where you generally only look at something from a fairly fixed, nearby distance.
Finally, in one mammoth two-and-a-half-hour session I went over the Milky Way again by hand, adding gossamer stars clouds and actual dust lanes from reference photos. I spent so long looking at the Milky Way, in fact, that I now immediately recognize structures in the dust lanes in other photos from having painted them. There are still some factually incorrect dust lanes in there, but it's much more realistic now. And at this point I realized that I was satisfied with it. I could keep tinkering with it and adding more details, but I was also fine with calling it finished (I also finally decided against adding any eruption activity). I did one last session on Pam's suggestion to add a bit more color to reflect the color of the Milky Way in the ice and to push Mauna Loa more into the background, and the result is:
My first painting is complete! I varnished it just this week. The lighting on this photo is, once again, pretty terrible, but it gives a decent idea of what it's like. Together the two canvases are 80×80 centimeters (31×31 inches), so it's reasonably large. I call it “Mauna Kea a me Mauna Loa ma lalo o ka lani hōkū (Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa beneath the starry heavens).”
It feels amazing to have finally finished it, and I've received lots of nice comments on it from people. I've really dived into painting, as I've found it to be way more fun and engaging than I had expected. I've picked up a number of tubes of paint and brushes, and even a palette knife which looks like a tiny trowel and reminds me of doing archaeology! I've been reading up on techniques and painting terms, and checking out the paintings of famous painters with a new eye. (I'm thankful for a decent amount of art history in my education, but I'm learning there are so many painters I've never even heard of!)
Now that I've finally cleared that picture from my head I find another one has arisen to take its place. People have also given me some ideas for others (like a series of planetary landscapes around the solar system), so we'll see what comes next. But one thing's for sure: I expect this to be a hobby for years to come. A hui hou!
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
A Good Tootgarook Lookout
This past weekend I went on a retreat with a bunch of other young adults from church down to Tootgarook, on Mornington Peninsula on the south side of Port Phillip Bay. We had a great time, the weather was a lot nicer than I heard it was back at my place, and the views were pretty fantastic. Good enough for me to take some panoramas again:
The picture above looks north, towards the center of Melbourne across Port Phillip Bay, although it was cloudy enough off to the north that we mostly didn't see it—just a bit on Sunday, and some of the lights at night. The beach was only about a fifteen minute walk, and we spent a little time there Saturday afternoon (though it was still much too cool for swimming this early in the spring).
On the right of the panorama you can see amountain hill called Arthur's Seat. Interestingly, it's named after another such mountain in Scotland, an extinct volcano. We stopped there on the way back on Sunday, for a lovely view of Port Phillip Bay:
I would've gotten a wider panorama but there were trees in the way the middle that would've messed it up, so you just get this. Well, and one more:
That's all for now, a hui hou!
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| The view from the house we stayed at, which was on top of a hill. |
On the right of the panorama you can see a
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| Near the top of Arthur's Seat, looking west and little north. |
That's all for now, a hui hou!
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
The Knitter of Oz
I've written before about my crochet hobby which I've been pursuing for quite a while now (though I did take a several-year-hiatus over college), having learned from my mother in my teens. She never picked up knitting, however, so I never learned it either.
Until this past week, when I learned from a friend here in Melbourne! I've often wondered how the two compared, since I had friends who knitted and it always seemed so complex to me, even as they told me how crochet was more complicated. Now that I've learned both, I can say that knitting feels simultaneously simpler and more complex than crochet. It's simpler in that there are mostly just two stitches compared to…uh, “several” in crochet. It's also more complex in that it uses two implements instead of one. It's also more nerve-wracking, at least at this stage, since it always feels like you're about to lose an entire row of stitches all at once in parallel, whereas in crochet you can only lose stitches serially.
Ultimately, I'm really enjoying it! There's a weird feeling of cachet that accompanies being able to whip out my knitting needles on the train or wherever (even if I'm as likely to be undoing errors as making progress at this point; I'm still somehow adding stitches in without meaning to). Maybe it has something to do with people almost invariably asking me what I was knitting while I was doing crochet in the past, and it'll be nice to finally not have to correct them. Whatever it is, I'll be sure to take photos once I have something worth showing! A hui hou!
Until this past week, when I learned from a friend here in Melbourne! I've often wondered how the two compared, since I had friends who knitted and it always seemed so complex to me, even as they told me how crochet was more complicated. Now that I've learned both, I can say that knitting feels simultaneously simpler and more complex than crochet. It's simpler in that there are mostly just two stitches compared to…uh, “several” in crochet. It's also more complex in that it uses two implements instead of one. It's also more nerve-wracking, at least at this stage, since it always feels like you're about to lose an entire row of stitches all at once in parallel, whereas in crochet you can only lose stitches serially.
Ultimately, I'm really enjoying it! There's a weird feeling of cachet that accompanies being able to whip out my knitting needles on the train or wherever (even if I'm as likely to be undoing errors as making progress at this point; I'm still somehow adding stitches in without meaning to). Maybe it has something to do with people almost invariably asking me what I was knitting while I was doing crochet in the past, and it'll be nice to finally not have to correct them. Whatever it is, I'll be sure to take photos once I have something worth showing! A hui hou!
Friday, September 28, 2018
A Year Down Under and an October Astrobite
As of September 29th I've been in Melbourne for a full year now. It's been a long year of working on my PhD, I've moved twice, and I miss Hilo's climate pretty often, but I've also made some amazing friends and discovered a facility for and enjoyment of painting I didn't know I had (about which I promise a post in the next few weeks). I've had artwork exhibited in a public exhibition, and learned that stars and CCDs are infinitely more complicated than I ever dreamed (or wanted to know).
In other news I put out a new Astrobite today, on a paper talking about finding the mass of the closest known white dwarf by measuring its gravitational redshift (basically, how much its light is redshifted climbing out of its gravitational well). This one was pretty interesting for me, as the authors used the Hubble Space Telescope and spent some time detailing all the tiny systematic errors in its spectrograph's CCD. Detailing tiny systematic errors in CCDs is pretty much my PhD (or at least it feels like at times) so I could really empathize with what they went through to get a good measurement. I also got some nice comments from two of the paper's authors, so that was cool.
That's it for now! A hui hou!
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| I've done an excellent job of hiding my telescope model behind a pillar in this photo. |
That's it for now! A hui hou!
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
α, π, and the Riemann Hypothesis
On September 24th an accomplished mathematician named Sir Michael Atiyah gave a presentation wherein he claimed to have discovered a simple proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, a 160-year-old open question in mathematics about the distribution of prime numbers. Most people making such a claim would be immediately dismissed (longstanding open questions like that in mathematics are usually solved as the result of many people working together rather than a single person), but Atiyah has won both the Fields Medal and Abell prize (both considered roughly the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematicians) and has enough credibility to cause people to take notice.
While this is interesting enough on its own for its many profound implications across mathematics, it's extremely interesting (and personal) for me due to the fact that Atiyah's claimed proof of the Riemann Hypothesis was apparently a happy accidental byproduct (!) of his true goal: finding a way to compute the value of the fine-structure constant, α based on other numbers. If you don't know, my entire Ph.D. revolves around searching for variation in α; if this claimed proof were to turn out to be true (and I'll revisit that if in a second), it would elevate α to the same level as e or π, an unchanging mathematical quantity. As far as I can tell, his calculation of the value of α would have it be proveably constant, which would put paid to the notion of searching for variation in it, and incidentally my entire Ph.D..
Now, I'm not getting too worried about this just yet for a few reasons. First of all, multiple people who know far more than I do about the relevant mathematics have expressed skepticism about the results. Atiyah, though undoubtedly incredibly smart and gifted, is getting on in years (he's 89), and has advanced a few theories in the past couple of years that have failed to gather peer support. It seems very unlikely that such a longstanding open question has a simple proof that no one has spotted until now. It's not impossible, especially as advances are made in mathematics over time, but, while romantic, the idea of a lone genius stumbling upon a profound proof is less and less likely nowadays where significant advances are increasingly the result of collaboration and correspondence between large teams of people.
Now, I'm only a humble physicist and no mathematician, and will freely admit that I don't understand probably the majority of the math behind the claimed proof, but I have three things that make me skeptical myself.
There's just something about α that seems to attract numerological explanations. Being a dimensionless physical constant with no known relation to other important mathematical constants or way of calculating its value seems to fire people's imaginations. Richard Feynmann in 1985 wrote of α:
However, this leads to a second consideration: α is a measured quantity. We don't have a method to calculate its value now (that's the whole reason behind my Ph.D.), and it's difficult to see how to prove that, even if the particular function Atiyah has introduced (called the Todd function) works as he claims, that it's actually producing the real, correct value of α and isn't merely a coincidence.
Finally, I'm a τ-ist; I believe that the correct circle constant is \(τ=2π\), so I find it unlikely that an explicit mathematical connection would exist between π and α. It's not impossible, certainly, but I strongly suspect that if such a connection exists it would be between α and τ, not π. Interestingly, I was able to gather that the proof involves a generalization of Euler's famous formula \(e^{i\pi}=-1\), which is partly only a thing due to using π instead of τ. (The τ version, \(e^{i\tau}=1\) is equally true but incredibly basic—it essentially says that if you go around \(360^\circ\) then you've made a full circle—and hasn't caught people's imagination the way Euler's version has.)
I've really only been able to do a bare minimum of reading about this topic, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on in the coming days and try to update you as I learn more. (The possibility—however remote—of one's Ph.D. being for naught is incredibly motivating!) A hui hou!
While this is interesting enough on its own for its many profound implications across mathematics, it's extremely interesting (and personal) for me due to the fact that Atiyah's claimed proof of the Riemann Hypothesis was apparently a happy accidental byproduct (!) of his true goal: finding a way to compute the value of the fine-structure constant, α based on other numbers. If you don't know, my entire Ph.D. revolves around searching for variation in α; if this claimed proof were to turn out to be true (and I'll revisit that if in a second), it would elevate α to the same level as e or π, an unchanging mathematical quantity. As far as I can tell, his calculation of the value of α would have it be proveably constant, which would put paid to the notion of searching for variation in it, and incidentally my entire Ph.D..
Now, I'm not getting too worried about this just yet for a few reasons. First of all, multiple people who know far more than I do about the relevant mathematics have expressed skepticism about the results. Atiyah, though undoubtedly incredibly smart and gifted, is getting on in years (he's 89), and has advanced a few theories in the past couple of years that have failed to gather peer support. It seems very unlikely that such a longstanding open question has a simple proof that no one has spotted until now. It's not impossible, especially as advances are made in mathematics over time, but, while romantic, the idea of a lone genius stumbling upon a profound proof is less and less likely nowadays where significant advances are increasingly the result of collaboration and correspondence between large teams of people.
Now, I'm only a humble physicist and no mathematician, and will freely admit that I don't understand probably the majority of the math behind the claimed proof, but I have three things that make me skeptical myself.
There's just something about α that seems to attract numerological explanations. Being a dimensionless physical constant with no known relation to other important mathematical constants or way of calculating its value seems to fire people's imaginations. Richard Feynmann in 1985 wrote of α:
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling [α] comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil."Soon after α was introduced by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1916 people began coming up with schemes for how it relates to various mathematical constants. Atiyah's proof claims a sort of connection with π, with 1/α being the limit of some kind of “renormalization” function acting on π. Numerological explanations have come and gone over the last century with none of them ultimately being accepted; while it's possible this is an exception, it's certainly not the first attempt someone has made to derive α from other numbers.
However, this leads to a second consideration: α is a measured quantity. We don't have a method to calculate its value now (that's the whole reason behind my Ph.D.), and it's difficult to see how to prove that, even if the particular function Atiyah has introduced (called the Todd function) works as he claims, that it's actually producing the real, correct value of α and isn't merely a coincidence.
Finally, I'm a τ-ist; I believe that the correct circle constant is \(τ=2π\), so I find it unlikely that an explicit mathematical connection would exist between π and α. It's not impossible, certainly, but I strongly suspect that if such a connection exists it would be between α and τ, not π. Interestingly, I was able to gather that the proof involves a generalization of Euler's famous formula \(e^{i\pi}=-1\), which is partly only a thing due to using π instead of τ. (The τ version, \(e^{i\tau}=1\) is equally true but incredibly basic—it essentially says that if you go around \(360^\circ\) then you've made a full circle—and hasn't caught people's imagination the way Euler's version has.)
I've really only been able to do a bare minimum of reading about this topic, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on in the coming days and try to update you as I learn more. (The possibility—however remote—of one's Ph.D. being for naught is incredibly motivating!) A hui hou!
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Walking About in “The Bush”
It's been a bit quiet on the ol’ blog front recently, hasn't it? I've had a few ideas for posts in mind but never seem to find time to realize them—I've been pretty busy with a number of things lately, including a new project I'm not quite ready to show off yet but has something to do with this:
Last week I went on a nature walk with a bunch of other young adults from church, which was a really enjoyable experience. It was one of the first days showing indications of spring so far this year, and the weather was pretty much perfect. We went for a (short) walk along the Yarra River (which flows through the heart of Melbourne) through “the bush,” a thick forest of eucalypts, wattles, and other Australian flora. (The only fauna we saw were some cockatoos, including some beautiful black ones, but we did hear a kookaburra.)
I still find it amusing that—due to growing up in a small eucalyptus grove in California—the smell of warm eucalyptus (…or wet eucalyptus, or really any eucalyptus) instantly makes me feel at home. Anyway, hopefully I'll have time to post some more soon, including my secret painting project which I'm enjoying far more than I expected. A hui hou!
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| Clearly, I've started up a paint factory. |
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| The Yarra River in panorama from the trail. |
Friday, August 31, 2018
An Observation on Communication
I noticed this the other day as I was explaining, for the umpteenth time, what I do as part of my Ph.D.:
I suppose I really shouldn't be complaining about people being eternally interested in what I do, but it does get a little tiring explaining (what are, ultimately, some fairly esoteric and difficult concepts) over and over again to new people. At least I'll have lots of practice! A hui hou!
I suppose I really shouldn't be complaining about people being eternally interested in what I do, but it does get a little tiring explaining (what are, ultimately, some fairly esoteric and difficult concepts) over and over again to new people. At least I'll have lots of practice! A hui hou!
Edit (6/3/22): It has occurred to me, in the interim, that the joke would be even better (and much more realistic) with the person on the left saying “Wow! I didn't understand a word of that!” at the end, in both panels. Ah well.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
An August Astrobite
Grad school and other things have kept me intensely busy this past week, which is why I'm just posting about an Astrobite I wrote on the 8th. I'll say upfront that I don't think this is my best work; not that it's particularly bad or under my standards for writing, I just realized over the course of writing it that I wasn't quite as interested in the subject matter as I thought when I started.
It's still reasonably interesting however, the subject matter being that when the authors examined a baker's dozen supernovae type Ia (that's “type one-A,” not “type eee-AA!”) which had been caught very early in their brightening stage they found evidence for two distinct populations when looking at the color of their spectra. “Color” in this case is an astronomical term for summing up the flux in two different filters that cover different spectral ranges and subtracting them, leaving a single number to represent the color. Most commonly the “Blue” and “Visible” filters are used to get what's known as a \(B-V\) color (visible here meaning roughly “green”), but any two filters in any part of the spectrum can work. Basically, some of the supernovae looked “red” and some looked “blue,” though the differences disappeared after about four or five days since the explosion.
Most supernovae aren't caught this early, which is why they had so few to work with despite there being hundreds of known type Ia supernovae. Interestingly, in a bit of a personal connection to the paper, one of the supernovae they looked at was SN 2011fe—which I actually got a picture of while in Hawaii! I didn't realize this until after I'd chosen the paper and started writing it up.
If there's one thing I learned while doing background research on supernovae type Ia for this Astrobite, it's that we still have much to learn about these enigmatic explosions. A hui hou!
It's still reasonably interesting however, the subject matter being that when the authors examined a baker's dozen supernovae type Ia (that's “type one-A,” not “type eee-AA!”) which had been caught very early in their brightening stage they found evidence for two distinct populations when looking at the color of their spectra. “Color” in this case is an astronomical term for summing up the flux in two different filters that cover different spectral ranges and subtracting them, leaving a single number to represent the color. Most commonly the “Blue” and “Visible” filters are used to get what's known as a \(B-V\) color (visible here meaning roughly “green”), but any two filters in any part of the spectrum can work. Basically, some of the supernovae looked “red” and some looked “blue,” though the differences disappeared after about four or five days since the explosion.
Most supernovae aren't caught this early, which is why they had so few to work with despite there being hundreds of known type Ia supernovae. Interestingly, in a bit of a personal connection to the paper, one of the supernovae they looked at was SN 2011fe—which I actually got a picture of while in Hawaii! I didn't realize this until after I'd chosen the paper and started writing it up.
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| Messier 101 with SN 2011fe marked with the green dots. |
Monday, August 13, 2018
Personal Panoramic History, Part 7: 2014
I thought 2013 (covered previously here) was a slow year for panoramas, but I think 2014 has it beat. The first photos I found that could be put together were all the way in…
In September a friend and I hiked into Pololū Valley, and along the way we stopped at the overlook for Waipiʻo Valley. These two valleys are the ends of a chain of huge valleys that cut into the northeastern face of the remains of the Kohala volcano, the oldest and northernmost of the five sub-aerial (i.e., above sea level) volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaiʻi. There are some seven major valleys and dozens of small ones, and the whole area is among the least accessible on the island. There's a car-traversable road into Waipiʻo Valley, but accessing the other valleys requires either hiking up and back down several-hundred-feet cliff walls multiple times, or a canoe.
Here's the Waipiʻo Valley overlook. In Ancient Hawaiʻi these valleys were significant population centers, but this is the only one people still inhabit today.
After stopping there we drove around to the north end of the island and came down the coast to Pololū Valley, where this panorama was taken. This is the view from the parking lot at the overlook at the start of the footpath down into the valley. This is definitely one of my favorite panoramas I've taken, I think; it just came out really nicely. It was just three photos, taken almost on the spur of the moment.
This panorama comes from about halfway down the footpath into the valley. You can see the same headland and rocks in the water that are visible in the picture above. You can also see that the clouds to the west were starting to come in and cover the brilliant blue sky to east. Luckily we didn't get rained up, but it got a lot grayer after this!
In November I took my second trip to see Lake Waiau near the summit of Mauna Kea, and took the opportunity to take some more panoramas.
Here's one from slightly up the edge of the crater that the lake sits in. I didn't notice the two hikers at the far right on the crater rim until after I'd assembled the panorama, but they give you a (very poor) sense of scale.
And here's a panorama from by the shore. The lake was a lot more full this time than it was when I visited it the first time back in 2011. I don't think it gets much more full than this, however, as I believe it starts to spill out the west side of the crater directly opposite from where these photos were taken if the lake level gets any higher.
And that's it for 2014, a rather slow year in the photo-taking department. Well, at least when it comes to turning photos into panoramas. 2015 will be a bit short as well, but it does have a few nice ones that I hadn't put together before finding Hugin and thus haven't shown before, including some more from Oregon. A hui hou!
September
In September a friend and I hiked into Pololū Valley, and along the way we stopped at the overlook for Waipiʻo Valley. These two valleys are the ends of a chain of huge valleys that cut into the northeastern face of the remains of the Kohala volcano, the oldest and northernmost of the five sub-aerial (i.e., above sea level) volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaiʻi. There are some seven major valleys and dozens of small ones, and the whole area is among the least accessible on the island. There's a car-traversable road into Waipiʻo Valley, but accessing the other valleys requires either hiking up and back down several-hundred-feet cliff walls multiple times, or a canoe.
Here's the Waipiʻo Valley overlook. In Ancient Hawaiʻi these valleys were significant population centers, but this is the only one people still inhabit today.
After stopping there we drove around to the north end of the island and came down the coast to Pololū Valley, where this panorama was taken. This is the view from the parking lot at the overlook at the start of the footpath down into the valley. This is definitely one of my favorite panoramas I've taken, I think; it just came out really nicely. It was just three photos, taken almost on the spur of the moment.
This panorama comes from about halfway down the footpath into the valley. You can see the same headland and rocks in the water that are visible in the picture above. You can also see that the clouds to the west were starting to come in and cover the brilliant blue sky to east. Luckily we didn't get rained up, but it got a lot grayer after this!
November
In November I took my second trip to see Lake Waiau near the summit of Mauna Kea, and took the opportunity to take some more panoramas.
Here's one from slightly up the edge of the crater that the lake sits in. I didn't notice the two hikers at the far right on the crater rim until after I'd assembled the panorama, but they give you a (very poor) sense of scale.
And here's a panorama from by the shore. The lake was a lot more full this time than it was when I visited it the first time back in 2011. I don't think it gets much more full than this, however, as I believe it starts to spill out the west side of the crater directly opposite from where these photos were taken if the lake level gets any higher.
And that's it for 2014, a rather slow year in the photo-taking department. Well, at least when it comes to turning photos into panoramas. 2015 will be a bit short as well, but it does have a few nice ones that I hadn't put together before finding Hugin and thus haven't shown before, including some more from Oregon. A hui hou!
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
House Heating Haranguing
This past week I moved house from the place I'd been staying since I first arrived in Melbourne (which is why it's been a bit quiet around here). The place I moved to has no central heating, so I've been huddled in my room for the past few days (I'm also in the midst of a two-week vacation) with a single brave space heater which is doing its valiant best to warm it up to a livable temperature in here. (“Livable,” for me, a child of the tropics, being at bare minimum 20 °C [68 °F].) This has led to much rumination on my part about how houses in Melbourne seem to be undesigned to handle the normal temperature extremes in the region. It's like houses in Melbourne are built on the perpetually optimistic outlook that every day will be a balmy 20–24 °C (68–75.2 °F). Yet I've already endured weeks of temperatures being in the 5–15 °C (41–59 °F) range, with no end to winter in sight.
For starters, most houses are built out of brick, a novel building material for me as I don't recall ever living in a house so constructed (it's possible that I may have as a kid too young to remember). Having spent several months with it, my observation is that brick seems to retain heat about as well as a sieve does water. (I have a 1500 watt space heater, which can, over the course of hours, infinitesimally raise the temperature in my average-sized bedroom, which simple thermodynamics suggests means that the outgoing heat flux is of the same order of magnitude.) Insulation seems to be a foreign concept, and as mentioned whoever built the house I'm in saw no need for including any sort of central heating system, which just kind of blows my mind.
From talking with a few fellow Americans at CAS from Michigan and Wisconsin and a fellow student from the Netherlands, I gather that they too have noticed this, and that this issue of houses not seemingly being built for the weather is not really a problem at those locations. This has led me to formulate the following graph, based on my own experiences and hear-say from others:
Basically, for places where it either gets really cold (like, freezing temperatures or below), or doesn't get very cold (like in Hilo, at the 15 °C end), houses are generally constructed in such a way that they can handle those temperatures pretty well. But if it gets cold, but not quite down to freezing, eh, people can just tough it out, amirite? It's not actually freezing yet, what are you complaining for? (Can you tell I get rather bitter and sarcastic when I'm cold?)
I've also (re)discovered that my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is directly and strongly correlated with the temperature outside the covers. I've only been able to directly test this over a moderately small temperature range so far (~11–22 °C), but extrapolating it out to “the house is on fire”-level temperatures I find that I would indeed be extremely motivated to get up, so it checks out.
Anyway, thank God for personal space heaters and all the quilts and blankets people have gifted me with over time (seriously, a blanket is probably one of the best gifts you could give me; I treasure them all). And winter should “only” last another two to three months. I really am quite happy with my new place otherwise—but oh, how I miss Hilo's climate during the winter! A hui hou!
For starters, most houses are built out of brick, a novel building material for me as I don't recall ever living in a house so constructed (it's possible that I may have as a kid too young to remember). Having spent several months with it, my observation is that brick seems to retain heat about as well as a sieve does water. (I have a 1500 watt space heater, which can, over the course of hours, infinitesimally raise the temperature in my average-sized bedroom, which simple thermodynamics suggests means that the outgoing heat flux is of the same order of magnitude.) Insulation seems to be a foreign concept, and as mentioned whoever built the house I'm in saw no need for including any sort of central heating system, which just kind of blows my mind.
From talking with a few fellow Americans at CAS from Michigan and Wisconsin and a fellow student from the Netherlands, I gather that they too have noticed this, and that this issue of houses not seemingly being built for the weather is not really a problem at those locations. This has led me to formulate the following graph, based on my own experiences and hear-say from others:
 |
| I've personally had experience in the 0–15 °C range. |
I've also (re)discovered that my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is directly and strongly correlated with the temperature outside the covers. I've only been able to directly test this over a moderately small temperature range so far (~11–22 °C), but extrapolating it out to “the house is on fire”-level temperatures I find that I would indeed be extremely motivated to get up, so it checks out.
Anyway, thank God for personal space heaters and all the quilts and blankets people have gifted me with over time (seriously, a blanket is probably one of the best gifts you could give me; I treasure them all). And winter should “only” last another two to three months. I really am quite happy with my new place otherwise—but oh, how I miss Hilo's climate during the winter! A hui hou!
Saturday, July 14, 2018
Another (Unexpected) July Astrobite! Structured Satellite Galaxies
So just a few days after my previous Astrobite summarizing the ASA meeting I got a surprise when I woke up to an email from the Astrobites scheduler saying that he'd posted my Astrobite I wrote for the queue back in February. This one deals with an interesting problem I'd never heard of before called the “Satellite Planes of Galaxies problem.” Observations of he Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and Centaurus A show that a significant fraction of the satellite galaxies around them tend to orbit in correlated planes. Yet similar-looking structures are vanishingly rare in simulations, to the point where it would be exceedingly unlikely to find them around three galaxies so close to each other. It's pretty interesting as while we've had hints of theses planar structures around the Milky Way for a few decades and Andromeda for a little less it's only recently that we've really been able to confirm them and discover the one around Centaurus A.
Something amusing I found in this paper was the name for the structure around the Andromeda Galaxy, which is called the “Great Plane of Andromeda.” This sounds like a reference to a very old name for the Andromeda galaxy, several hundred years ago when it was known as the Great Nebula in Andromeda. I just like the idea that anything associated with the galaxy becomes known as the “Great ____ in/of Andromeda.” A hui hou!
Something amusing I found in this paper was the name for the structure around the Andromeda Galaxy, which is called the “Great Plane of Andromeda.” This sounds like a reference to a very old name for the Andromeda galaxy, several hundred years ago when it was known as the Great Nebula in Andromeda. I just like the idea that anything associated with the galaxy becomes known as the “Great ____ in/of Andromeda.” A hui hou!
Saturday, July 7, 2018
July Astrobite: Summarizing the ASA Meeting
My Astrobite for July came out yesterday, a short summary of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) meeting last week. Well, I say “short,” but as it's not a normal paper summary I allowed myself another hundred words or so beyond the usual thousand-word-limit. I think there were a hundred and forty talks total, so to summarize I just picked one from each day from a range of topics and by people from different universities. Even then I didn't have room to cover some of the things that came up such as a good number of talks about radio astronomy which covered things like using measurements of pulsar timing across the Milky Way to make a very sensitive gravitational wave detector on a galactic scale.
One thing I did notice over the course of last week, though, was that there weren't any other talks or posters related to my area of research in varying constants. There were quite a few areas where there were multiple talks/posters on similar subjects (like gravitational waves, or pulsar timing, or the challenges of big data), but nobody else presenting anything like what I'm doing. (That I saw at least; there were parallel session each afternoon of which I could only watch one, but from reading the talk titles I don't think I missed anything obviously related.) Certainly there are other people working in this area, but it was interesting to have presented what felt like a pretty unique talk. Anyway, that's enough for now or I'll end up writing another thousand-word summary. A hui hou!
One thing I did notice over the course of last week, though, was that there weren't any other talks or posters related to my area of research in varying constants. There were quite a few areas where there were multiple talks/posters on similar subjects (like gravitational waves, or pulsar timing, or the challenges of big data), but nobody else presenting anything like what I'm doing. (That I saw at least; there were parallel session each afternoon of which I could only watch one, but from reading the talk titles I don't think I missed anything obviously related.) Certainly there are other people working in this area, but it was interesting to have presented what felt like a pretty unique talk. Anyway, that's enough for now or I'll end up writing another thousand-word summary. A hui hou!
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Belated Tau Day! And the 2018 ASA Meeting
Happy (belated) Tau Day (6/28/2018) everyone! Yes, it's that time of year again when we celebrate the correct circle constant, \(\tau\ (=2\pi=6.283185…)\). I'll do my usual linking to the official Tau Day website, and note to myself that I should consider getting one of the \(\tau\)-shirts. A triumph for tau is that it's now officially part of the Python math module as of version 3.6! Just do from math import tau to start using it.
In other news, it's been a very busy week and a half for me. Last Thursday I headed out to the gold-rush town of Ballarat an hour and a half by train from Melbourne for the Harley Wood School for Astronomy (HWSA). This is an annual workshop for graduate students, where this year some fifty students from all across Australia spent a very frigid weekend at the historical Ballarat Municipal Observatory. We had some interesting talks and workshops and I got to meet quite a few fellow students from other universities.
Anyway, Sunday before coming back to Melbourne I and a few other students visited Sovereign Hill, a tourist attraction in the form of a historic mining town from Victoria's gold rush in the 1850s. Being just a few years after the California gold rush there are a lot of similarities, but I think I'll save a fuller explanation (and some pictures) for a later post.
On Monday the week-long Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) annual conference began. This is my first time attending such an event as a participant, as when I went to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Honolulu in 2015 I didn't actually attend any of the talks. This time not only have I been sitting in on talks all week, but I gave one of my own on Monday!
It's essentially the same talk as I did for my Confirmation of Candidature cut down to half the time with more focus on the theory and less what I actually did, but from the comments I received it came off pretty well. I had the very last talk of the day on Monday and several people said I'd managed to keep their interest during it, so I consider that an accomplishment.
Having got my talk out of the way Monday I was free to enjoy the rest of the week. I listened to a lot of talks on some very interesting astronomy going on in Australia, and having been to HWSA before hand I knew a number of the speakers and poster authors, which was cool.
Today's also the last day of the Deeper, Darker, Brighter exhibition as well. Tomorrow we'll be removing our artworks from the gallery, and hopefully moving towards starting up our weekly art workshops again!
June's been a very busy and somewhat stressful month overall for me, and I'm looking forward to things settling down a bit. It's perhaps not surprising that I came down with a cold immediately after the ASA meeting finished, so I'll keep this post short tonight. A hui hou!
In other news, it's been a very busy week and a half for me. Last Thursday I headed out to the gold-rush town of Ballarat an hour and a half by train from Melbourne for the Harley Wood School for Astronomy (HWSA). This is an annual workshop for graduate students, where this year some fifty students from all across Australia spent a very frigid weekend at the historical Ballarat Municipal Observatory. We had some interesting talks and workshops and I got to meet quite a few fellow students from other universities.
Anyway, Sunday before coming back to Melbourne I and a few other students visited Sovereign Hill, a tourist attraction in the form of a historic mining town from Victoria's gold rush in the 1850s. Being just a few years after the California gold rush there are a lot of similarities, but I think I'll save a fuller explanation (and some pictures) for a later post.
On Monday the week-long Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) annual conference began. This is my first time attending such an event as a participant, as when I went to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Honolulu in 2015 I didn't actually attend any of the talks. This time not only have I been sitting in on talks all week, but I gave one of my own on Monday!
It's essentially the same talk as I did for my Confirmation of Candidature cut down to half the time with more focus on the theory and less what I actually did, but from the comments I received it came off pretty well. I had the very last talk of the day on Monday and several people said I'd managed to keep their interest during it, so I consider that an accomplishment.
Having got my talk out of the way Monday I was free to enjoy the rest of the week. I listened to a lot of talks on some very interesting astronomy going on in Australia, and having been to HWSA before hand I knew a number of the speakers and poster authors, which was cool.
Today's also the last day of the Deeper, Darker, Brighter exhibition as well. Tomorrow we'll be removing our artworks from the gallery, and hopefully moving towards starting up our weekly art workshops again!
June's been a very busy and somewhat stressful month overall for me, and I'm looking forward to things settling down a bit. It's perhaps not surprising that I came down with a cold immediately after the ASA meeting finished, so I'll keep this post short tonight. A hui hou!
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Landscapes of Hawaiʻi
Last week a former co-worker of mine from when I was working for ASIAA with the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array put up a video he'd taken with a drone showing some of the landscape around the Saddle region of the island of Hawaiʻi and the area around the YTLA. It's absolutely fantastic, and I highly recommend you watch it below:
Seeing these landscapes I know and love from a perspective at once familiar and alien was really quite a powerful experience for me. The first ~1:10 of the video shows the Saddle region between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, and the Mauna Loa access road splitting off from Saddle Road near Puʻu Huluhulu (which I've written about before). I know this road like the back of my hand from driving it so often last year, and seeing it from a bird's eye view—being able to see all the different lava flows of which you can form but such an imperfect and fragmentary picture from the ground—was incredibly thrilling. In some ways, though, it wasn't entirely alien, because from up on the slopes on Mauna Loa we could always look back and see down to Puʻu Huluhulu and where the road connected; we just couldn't see it this closely. Thus the interesting sensation of seeing something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.
Apparently the experience of seeing my favorite volcanoes again affected me more powerfully than I thought, because last Friday at lunch when I noticed that the whiteboard in the lunch room was uncharacteristically clean I found myself with a vision of the island in my head and a powerful compulsion to draw it out, which led to me creating this:
I've been thinking, now that I've finished with my YTLA model, of taking up painting as a way of de-stressing. I enjoyed painting my model quite a bit, and feel like it'd be nice to leave out the model-making and just focus on the painting. I'd like to do landscapes, in a sort of extension of my love of panoramas. I've had a picture in my head that I've wanted to create since something like 2012, similar to this one though more focused (and a night scene), and I'm looking forward to finally working it out.
We may even be able restart the weekly art workshops we had for the first few months of the year! Both Pam and Carolyn (our art mentors) and several other students are quite enthusiastic about the idea, so we shall see. A hui hou!
Seeing these landscapes I know and love from a perspective at once familiar and alien was really quite a powerful experience for me. The first ~1:10 of the video shows the Saddle region between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, and the Mauna Loa access road splitting off from Saddle Road near Puʻu Huluhulu (which I've written about before). I know this road like the back of my hand from driving it so often last year, and seeing it from a bird's eye view—being able to see all the different lava flows of which you can form but such an imperfect and fragmentary picture from the ground—was incredibly thrilling. In some ways, though, it wasn't entirely alien, because from up on the slopes on Mauna Loa we could always look back and see down to Puʻu Huluhulu and where the road connected; we just couldn't see it this closely. Thus the interesting sensation of seeing something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.
Apparently the experience of seeing my favorite volcanoes again affected me more powerfully than I thought, because last Friday at lunch when I noticed that the whiteboard in the lunch room was uncharacteristically clean I found myself with a vision of the island in my head and a powerful compulsion to draw it out, which led to me creating this:
 |
| Hawaiʻi island from the north, maybe ~5–6,000 meters up. I ran out of room to show Kohala at the bottom. |
We may even be able restart the weekly art workshops we had for the first few months of the year! Both Pam and Carolyn (our art mentors) and several other students are quite enthusiastic about the idea, so we shall see. A hui hou!
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Confirmation of Candidature Passed!
Yesterday I passed my Confirmation of Candidature review, so I'm a real Ph.D. student now! The past two weeks were a bit stressful as I first had to write a report, then a half-hour talk, then give the talk yesterday, but it's all done now. Judging by the number of questions people found my talk very interesting—usually you see maybe four–six questions afterwards, but as I was answering the seventh or eighth one I was starting to be ready for them to end! Michael (my adviser) said afterwards that answering questions in this area of research can often be difficult since people will often ask questions while laboring under a misconception about what you're doing, so it requires understanding what they're not understanding and addressing that first before you can answer the question they're really asking.
Anyway, the review panel was quite happy with my progress and had a few good suggestions for improvements to be made in the future. Now that's that over I have a week and a half to squeeze in a little work before the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) annual meeting starts and I get to give basically the same talk in half the time. (The ASA meeting is being hosted at Swinburne this year, which is incredibly convenient for me!) A hui hou!
Anyway, the review panel was quite happy with my progress and had a few good suggestions for improvements to be made in the future. Now that's that over I have a week and a half to squeeze in a little work before the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) annual meeting starts and I get to give basically the same talk in half the time. (The ASA meeting is being hosted at Swinburne this year, which is incredibly convenient for me!) A hui hou!
Sunday, June 3, 2018
A Trip to Healesville Sanctuary
Last month on the 5th of May I accepted an offer by a recently-graduated student at Swinburne for a lift out to the Healesville Sanctuary, a zoo/conservatory about an hour out of Melbourne in the Yarra Valley. Healesville Sanctuary focuses on native Australian fauna and has a strong captive breeding program, being the first place in the world to successfully breed platypuses in captivity in 1943.
I brought my camera with me, but about an hour after we arrived we attended a fantastic bird show where I decided to try out the new super-slow motion feature on the camera of my new phone. And after getting a few video clips of birds in slow motion, I thought why not get some more clips of various animals and make a video out of it? So I did.
I didn't remember or manage to get video clips of all the animals I wanted to, so there are a few still photos in there, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I'm especially pleased with that two-second side-on clip of a platypus swimming by; none of my attempts to photograph the platypuses worked out, but somehow the videos did. A hui hou!
I brought my camera with me, but about an hour after we arrived we attended a fantastic bird show where I decided to try out the new super-slow motion feature on the camera of my new phone. And after getting a few video clips of birds in slow motion, I thought why not get some more clips of various animals and make a video out of it? So I did.
I didn't remember or manage to get video clips of all the animals I wanted to, so there are a few still photos in there, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I'm especially pleased with that two-second side-on clip of a platypus swimming by; none of my attempts to photograph the platypuses worked out, but somehow the videos did. A hui hou!
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| A picture that didn't make it into the video but I thought was fun. |
Monday, May 28, 2018
Personal Panoramic History, Part 6: 2013
Previously, 2012 was a slow year for panoramas, and 2013 seems to have been the year of low-quality-phone-camera panoramas for me. I didn't actually take as many pictures this year in general, probably because I started my first full-time job with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in January and wasn't getting out quite as much. And of the trips I did go on, some such as the ones to various lava tubes didn't really make for prime panorama material, or were in really overcast conditions that didn't make for great contrast. As such I'll be omitting some of the lower-quality camera phone panoramas from this year that I don't feel merit inclusion here.
Prior to starting work at the JCMT on the 15th of January, while I was home for a few weeks over Christmas my family took a trip to Florida in the first week of January for a few days to see a Cornhuskers game. (Fun fact I learned while going on a wiki-walk from that link: Nebraska, my home state, is the only triply-landlocked U.S. state, meaning you'd need to pass through at least three other states to reach the sea. How funny that I would later move to the only totally insular state…) While in Florida we did some sightseeing, including visiting Disney World and Cape Canaveral, but the only panorama I was able to make from my photos there is from a lake we took an airboat tour on.
Unfortunately I don't remember what lake this is, but it was pretty neat to be able to get out on it and see the wildlife. Which consisted almost entirely of birds, because it was cold the entire week were there so all the alligator were staying pretty quiet. I think we got to see a single wild one resting by the side of the lake and that was it. (We got to hold a baby one in the tourist store by the lake, though, so that was neat!)
Jumping all the way to August: in August 2013 my paternal grandfather passed away after battling cancer for well over a decade, something I only ever touched on very briefly at the time. I didn't really appreciate at the time how well he'd adapted to technology after a life spent farming, but he used to send out weekly email updates to the family for years, mementos I still have to remember him by. I went back to Nebraska for the funeral, where I stayed at the ancestral Berke farmstead with the rest of my family. It's been in the family for generations, since the 1800s; I've even seen the (remains of the) original Berke family dugout! (And you thought the family roots stuff was last post…) I think that's the most recently I've been out to Nebraska, almost five years ago now which is a bit sad, but while I was there I took the panorama below:
It's another early camera software panorama so it's got some ugly seams if you look closely, and I somehow got my finger in it (‽), but it shows a scene I'm intimately familiar with from early childhood visits to the grandparents, out on a familiar ridge on the farm looking back over the valley to where the house stands. (Fun fact: I've discovered I have a very visceral association with the smell of Baby's Breath flowers which I think stems from smelling them as a very young child around my grandparent's garden.)
(I'm always confused, by the way, by people who find out I was born in Nebraska and go “Oh Nebraska! It's so flat!” While it's certainly not the Rocky Mountains, the area around here for miles in all directions is rolling prairie hills, with lots of steep erosional gullies and canyons in the rich loess that makes the ground so fertile for farming. The one place I've found on Earth, so far, that reminds me of it? About seven to eight thousand feet up the sides of Mauna Kea, where the land similarly slopes in gentle rolling folds and the wind constantly whistles through the grass and sparse trees that make up most of the vegetation.)
In November I took a trip to Volcanoes National Park with some friends—as far as I can tell, my first visit to it since 2009. (I documented it more thoroughly in three parts here, here, and here.) Luckily, like the last time, I took some enough pictures to get some great panoramas!
Just another Mauna Loa panorama, taken from near the parking lot near the visitor center/Thomas A. Jagger museum/Kīlauea caldera overlook. Yep, that's one long mountain all right. I originally made this panorama manually (you can see it by mousing over the one in the first post linked above), but with Hugin I was able to include an additional photo or two on the ends to make it a bit wider.
From around here I got two more incredible panoramas; one of Kīlauea caldera as a whole:
Here you have a pretty wide view of the caldera, with the visitor overlook (and my friend Graham!) visible on the far left. This is the view from somewhere along the walk from the parking lot to the overlook.
Here you can see a close-up of Halemaʻumaʻu crater within the caldera. The lava lake present at the time was too far down to see, but you can see where it was releasing lots of sulfur dioxide and other lovely noxious gasses. For some reason I never developed either of these two panoramas until going through my photos for this post, so these are never-before-seen ones from me! Which is too bad that it took so long to develop them, as I especially like the first one for the sense of scale and grandeur it shows.
After seeing the caldera, we hiked the Kīlauea Iki trail (documented in the second post linked above), a first for me. It's a great hike, and one I've done three times now. I've discovered it's really hard to get both the rock and the sky exposed correctly, because the rock is so dark and black that the sky automatically overexposes if you're trying to take photos from within the crater. You can see the original hand-made panorama by mousing over the one in the linked post, and boy does it look distorted compared to this one that Hugin made!
This is another newly-created panorama that hasn't been shown before, but I've got some other pictures from the same area in the third post linked above. The area being down on the coastal plain near the ocean, looking back up towards Kīlauea and nā pali (the cliffs). It's not particularly interesting, but I like how you can see where the lava more recently came over the cliffs on the right (eastern) side.
And that's it for panoramas for 2013! It was definitely nice to close the year with a steady full-time job I loved for the first time. It looks like 2014 is going to be the slowest year yet for them, but I got some pretty great ones that year to make up for it, including a mix of new and unique and old and familiar subjects. A hui hou!
January
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| Florida lake. |
August
Jumping all the way to August: in August 2013 my paternal grandfather passed away after battling cancer for well over a decade, something I only ever touched on very briefly at the time. I didn't really appreciate at the time how well he'd adapted to technology after a life spent farming, but he used to send out weekly email updates to the family for years, mementos I still have to remember him by. I went back to Nebraska for the funeral, where I stayed at the ancestral Berke farmstead with the rest of my family. It's been in the family for generations, since the 1800s; I've even seen the (remains of the) original Berke family dugout! (And you thought the family roots stuff was last post…) I think that's the most recently I've been out to Nebraska, almost five years ago now which is a bit sad, but while I was there I took the panorama below:
 |
| The Berke family farm, Nebraska. |
(I'm always confused, by the way, by people who find out I was born in Nebraska and go “Oh Nebraska! It's so flat!” While it's certainly not the Rocky Mountains, the area around here for miles in all directions is rolling prairie hills, with lots of steep erosional gullies and canyons in the rich loess that makes the ground so fertile for farming. The one place I've found on Earth, so far, that reminds me of it? About seven to eight thousand feet up the sides of Mauna Kea, where the land similarly slopes in gentle rolling folds and the wind constantly whistles through the grass and sparse trees that make up most of the vegetation.)
November
In November I took a trip to Volcanoes National Park with some friends—as far as I can tell, my first visit to it since 2009. (I documented it more thoroughly in three parts here, here, and here.) Luckily, like the last time, I took some enough pictures to get some great panoramas!
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| Mauna Loa from near Kīlauea caldera. |
From around here I got two more incredible panoramas; one of Kīlauea caldera as a whole:
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| Kīlauea caldera. |
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| Halemaʻumaʻu crater within Kīlauea caldera. |
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| Kīlauea Iki, from the western end looking east. |
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| Kīlauea pali (cliffs) from down near the ocean on Chain of Craters road. |
And that's it for panoramas for 2013! It was definitely nice to close the year with a steady full-time job I loved for the first time. It looks like 2014 is going to be the slowest year yet for them, but I got some pretty great ones that year to make up for it, including a mix of new and unique and old and familiar subjects. A hui hou!
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