Personal Panoramic History, Part 5: 2012

The previous post in this series (covering 2011) had quite a lot pictures, but for whatever reason 2012 was a pretty slow year in the panorama department. I think part of it was that I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea for most of that year, which was also the year the transit of Venus happened. I was pretty quite preparing for it and then recovering from it afterwards, and it seems to have translated into fewer photo opportunities.

In January 2012 I got my first smartphone (a Samsung Galaxy S2), and with it my first automatic panorama creation ability. I didn't actually use it much because it was still pretty poor in those early Android versions, but I've got a few panoramas made using it from this year and we'll see more in the future.

April

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My first panoramas of the year don't come until April, but they come from the one time (so far…) that I've hiked Mauna Loa. And just as while hiking Mauna Kea I got pictures of Mauna Loa, so while hiking the latter I turned north to get pictures of the former.

Mauna Kea from the south.

Hualālai and Mauna Kea

 These two pictures are both from where the trailhead starts, just outside of the Mauna Loa Observatory entrance at 11,141 ft (3,397 m). The first one is a zoom-in on Mauna Kea, while the second is a much wider field view covering a bit less than ~180°, showing the Mauna Loa access road on the right and the start of the trail on the left.

Mauna Loa summit caldera.

Mauna Loa is so flat that while climbing it there isn't much to get panoramas of other than Mauna Kea, until you reach the summit caldera, Moku‘aweoweo. This panorama is still pretty cool to me, even if we didn't make it to Mauna Loa's summit that day, as it's technically the only time in my life I've been inside the caldera of an active volcano! (Even if it did last erupt in 1984…) You can see the sides of the caldera on the sides of the photo, as I climbed down just inside the rim (which was maybe three meters deep). I don't think this is a particularly great panorama, but it's special to me due to the circumstances surrounding its creation.

June

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Venus transiting before the Sun.

In June the latest transit of Venus (last one until 2117!) happened. This panorama is hand-made, as I couldn't get Hugin to make one for me using my photos. It's not really meant for astronomical panoramas and the photos aren't particularly well-focused either, so it's understandable that it failed to make anything of them.

August

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I didn't get around to making any more panoramas until August due to recuperating after the transit of Venus, and when I did I ended up taking my first auto-generated panoramas with my phone due to (as usual) my camera battery turning out to be dead. I was able to get a tour (I think with the University Astrophysics Club) of the Very Long Baseline Array dish on Mauna Kea, and it turned out to be a great panorama subject.

These early auto-generated panoramas are really ugly however, so I'm only going to show one to give an idea. I've got a few more, but I just don't feel like displaying them here; that early panorama creation software was pretty rough and the resulting images are not easy on the eyes. I did put two additional panoramas from this trip up in my original post about it, so you can follow the link if you really want to see more early auto-panorama creation eye-sores.

This is the dish of the VLBA telescope, from near it's rim. Which is about ten stories above the ground, by the way. I'm actually amazed the camera was able to get such a good contrast, considering the blinding whiteness of the dish.

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And that's actually it for panoramas from 2012! In October I did lava tube spelunking for the first time and got some cool pictures, but lava tubes unfortunately don't make great panorama vistas. As the end of the year approached I was starting to get pretty burnt out at my job as the Visitor Information Station; I discovered that there's a vast difference between doing something as a volunteer because you love it, and doing it because you get paid to do it. On a whim I applied to a job with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope that only required a Bachelor's degree, and near the end of November got a call saying I was being offered the job, which opened up a whole new chapter of my life. But that's for the next post! A hui hou!