Personal Panoramic History, Part 3: 2010

In the previous post in this series we looked at 2009 and a couple of my first attempts at taking panoramas of certain volcanoes. In 2010 I refined my technique a bit by taking panoramas of the same volcanoes—several times—but also experimented with some new things as well.

May

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My first panorama of the year comes from May, when the University Astrophysics Club at UH Hilo was given a tour of the Subaru telescope. I had the chance to do a little hiking around Hale Pōhaku while we were waiting to acclimatize which I used to take the following panorama from the top of Puʻu Kelepeamoa (a popular sunset-viewing spot nearby):

Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea.

This was my first full 360° panorama. Actually, it went slightly more than a full turn around and when I first stitched a panorama together from the photos I refused to drop any of them, leading to a rather weird image with Mauna Kea in the center and the summit of Mauna Loa showing up twice, on either side. Hugin luckily can work out a full rotation and stop there, and also allows you to rotate your endpoints around, so I've made it a bit nicer looking by scooting Mauna Kea over to the side and no longer splitting Mauna Loa in twain. If you follow the link above you can see the original version by mousing over the panorama (which is now this new one) in the original post it came from.

June

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Mauna Kea summit area.

In June I had another opportunity to visit Mauna Kea's summit (probably helping with a summit tour) and used it to snap this panorama. This one is taken from a totally different perspective than the one in part 2 which was taken from in front of the Keck building, which is the two identical domes near the center of the image. From left to right, you can see UKIRT, CSO (just barely), JCMT, SMA, Subarua, Keck I and II, IRTF, CFHT, and Gemini North.

July

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In July I created this, my first and so far only astronomical panorama. This one's another hand-made image, as Hugin couldn't manage it. This is because the image is made up of twelve different images, each of which was a thirty second exposure in order to collect enough light. While thirty seconds is short enough that the star trails induced by the earth's rotation aren't too noticeable in each individual image, the entire sky would have moved pretty appreciably between the start and end of the series of exposures. I'm not entirely sure how I managed to wrangle this into a panorama myself—with a lot of effort, I suspect—and looking at it now I sometimes think I see some duplicate bits, but I'm still pretty happy with this view of the northern hemisphere summer Milky Way from the area near the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. (You can see the glow from Hilo in the center of the image.)

August

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In August 2010 while I was back home for vacation during the summer my family went on a two-day road trip around some parts of northern California, including the coast and through the redwood forests. This let me experiment with a vertical panorama:

The Chandelier Tree in Leggett, California.

This is a hand-made panorama, as I just couldn't get Hugin to make a good looking result. It probably has to do with the unusual way the perspective changes from standing on the ground and rotating the camera up to get pictures. It's an interesting challenge though; maybe I should try more vertical panoramas in the future.

November

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In November 2010 I had my first chance to observe on Mauna Kea at Subaru while working as a student research assistant. Since we spent a day and a night at Hale Pōhaku acclimatizing before going up I had some time to hike a round and take a few panoramas:

Mauna Loa, Hualālai, and Mauna Kea.

You'd be forgiven for thinking I'd accidentally posted the same panorama from May again here. While writing this post I had to carefully double-check to make sure that I hadn't, as they both look pretty similar in the tiny preview thumbnails (this one has more cloud cover on the left, at least). While they do look very similar (and were taken from locations very close to each other on the top of Puʻu Kalepeamoa), the layout seen in both of them was created in this one and retroactively used for the May version when I was remaking both with Hugin. I like this layout a lot better, and I like to think it shows that I was getting a bit better at framing panoramas by this point.

Mauna Loa.

The previous panorama was taken from the summit of Puʻu Kalepeamoa, which is the hill in the foreground on the left of this image, which was taken from a cinder cone (or puʻu) slightly higher up Mauna Kea's flank. (Well, technically, “ka lepe a moa” means “the comb of the chicken”, and Puʻu Kelepeamoa is so named because it's a range of three or four rusty-red cinder cones that could be seen as a cock's comb, and I was technically still on [another part of] it while taking these pictures. The name is typically mostly used to refer to the hill lowest on the mountain and closest to the VIS, though.)

Mauna Loa and Hualālai.

This panorama was taken from a bit further up the flank of Mauna Kea again. In the foreground on the left you can see the summit of Puʻu Kalepeamoa again as well which helps give a sense of the movement between pictures. On the right side of this image you can see some more of the gigantic cinder cones (or puʻu) near the Visitor Information Station. These final two panoramas I'd never even created until writing this post so they're both completely new, which is a shame because I really like the last one—going through and creating these huge panoramas of gorgeous landscapes I just keep thinking “This would make a great picture to get printed and hang on my wall where I could actually enjoy it all at once, at full size.” Maybe in another decade or two when I can start to think about settling down and not moving every few years.

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And that's it for 2010! I spent some time refining my panorama technique with the same choice of targets that year (you're probably sick of Mauan Loa panoramas from the north by now), but for the next part covering 2011 I'll have a few unique panoramas which, for various reasons, I've never repeated. A hui hou!