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.

January

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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.

Florida lake.

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!)

August

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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.

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.)

November

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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!

Mauna Loa from near Kīlauea caldera.

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:

Kīlauea caldera.

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.

Halemaʻumaʻu crater within Kīlauea caldera.

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.

Kīlauea Iki, from the western end looking east.

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!

Kīlauea pali (cliffs) from down near the ocean on Chain of Craters road.

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!

May Astrobite, or “How Is a Pixel Like a Bucket?”

Just a quick post tonight to point out my most recent Astrobites article which came out on the 22nd. This one was very interesting to write. It's about a paper which I read when it first came out back in February on the arXiv. (It's pronounced “archive,” and it's a website where most papers in physics and astronomy and several over sciences are hosted freely available; it's undoubtedly revolutionized the areas it serves by making it easier to communicate results, and I can't imagine trying to do research without it.) I'd been stockpiling recent papers that looked interesting for a week or two before sitting down to write, but none of them really seemed to call to me, till I finally remembered this interesting paper I'd read about CCD systematics.

CCD stands for charge-coupled device, which is the technology behind most digital cameras nowadays. Astronomers adopted them very rapidly back in the 1970s soon after they were invented, and they're responsible for a very wide variety of astronomical research since then. Despite coming up on fifty years old, the authors of the paper I wrote about managed to find a new, never-before-seen form of subtle systematic errors in sixteen out of twenty-two instruments they investigated. The thing that really blew my mind while browsing the abstract and got me to read the paper? They noticed an effect that was proportional to the number of 1's in the binary representation of the value of various pixels in the image.

If you just said “What‽” out loud like I did upon reading that, check out the paper! It's really well written and does a good job of explaining their findings with some really good, high-quality graphs. If you don't know what that means or why it sounds so weird, maybe check out my astrobite—I spent several hours wrestling with an analogy involving grids of buckets and sprinklers in an attempt to render the technical details more approachable, so hopefully I've explained it there in a way that makes sense.

Basically, the top part should be a flat line at zero, not…this.

The results of this paper, while not necessarily highly problematic, are likely to be very far reaching and will affect a lot of people and their science, so now that it's been officially published as of May 11th I expect we'll start seeing some more papers popping up on arXiv related to the issue it reveals. (arXiv allows people to upload “preprints” of papers that have been submitted to journals and are in the process of peer review, which is how I was able to read it back in February.) That's it from me for now though, a hui hou!

Family Roots

Another year, another birthday. And what an eventful year it's been! This time last year I was still working at the YTLA in Hawaii (and I'm pretty sure I got to observe on my birthday night) and working through the application process at Swinburne.

Back around the end of April I heard from my mother about some genealogical research my aunt had been doing which I found quite fascinating, so as I ponder another year lived I thought I'd share some of these family roots for posterity.

According to the Mayflower Society, it turns out that on my mom's side I'm descended from several of the passengers who came over to North America on the Mayflower in 1620, specifically John Alden and Priscilla Mullins (who were married a year after arriving, in 1621). While reading about them I discovered that the famous American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was also descended from them, making us distantly related. And then I discovered that he wrote a famous epic poem in dactylic hexameter about them called The Courtship of Miles Standish! (You can read it here.) It's about a love triangle between John Alden, Priscilla Mullins, and the eponymous Miles Standish, and how (spoilers) John and Priscilla eventually end up married. It's unknown if it's historically accurate or not; Longfellow always maintained that it was a retelling of oral history passed down through the family, though at the very least he likely made use of some poetic license by compressing several years of events down. It's a good poem, if really, really weird knowing it's about my ancestors. (I already know how it ends, or else I wouldn't be here! Talk about spoilers!)

According to my aunt's research we're also descended from William Brewster and his wife Mary, more Mayflower Pilgrims, though she forgot to get it checked by the Mayflower Society at the same time. (Edit 5/26/18: She got back to me that they were able to confirm this as well, with the additional information that I'm fifteen generations removed.) While researching them and William's rather exciting life I discovered there's a style of furniture called a Brewster Chair, named after a particular chair created for and owned by him. Even more incredibly, the actual chair owned by my ancestor is still around in the Pilgrim Hall Museum, and you can see a picture of it below!

Original Brewster chair (left, public domain photo).

As I reflect on all this information this year there are a lot of emotions to process. As I reside here in Australia, it's encouraging to think that my family's been crossing oceans to make new lives for themselves on the strength of their religious convictions for centuries. And knowing that my ancestors were present for the first Thanksgiving in 1621 has given the holiday new meaning for me; I think come 2021 I'll make a point to celebrate it with the tagline “A family tradition for 400 years!” A hui hou!

An Arty Astronomical Exhibition

Well, the art exhibition opening on Saturday was a great success! I got to talk to quite a few people who came through over the course of the multi-hour event and ended up being put on the spot as soon as I showed up (I was the first of the PhD students involved to arrive) to say a few words about the process, so I'm glad I dressed up a bit. This was also my first opportunity to see much of Carolyn and Pam's work and to see everything professionally arranged and lit, so it was quite impressive.

This picture shows two of my friends' projects, a black hole (bottom), brown dwarf (left), white hole (top), and the James Webb Space Telescope (right). The JWST model is I believe 1/12 scale, and it's still over a meter long! I spent an hour and a half on Thursday helping hang it from the ceiling which was quite an experience. They're in a darkened room where there's an animation about the Deeper Wider Faster project that inspired this exhibition playing, and they look amazing in the darkness.

Another friend of mine made this imaginative representation of a spiral galaxy being red- and blue-shifted by rotation. She planned it all out in code and matplotlib before making it and it came out very impressive (and fragile unfortunately, though that's true more or less of all our work!). We were all pleasantly surprised on Saturday to discover that the spiral structure, which didn't show up much from the side, was silhouetted on the wall behind it due to the lighting.

And here's me with my model! I got it to a point where I could both continue to add detail to it but could also call it finished at any point, and I'm pretty happy with where it ended up. (The only thing I'm not pleased with is that the cardboard platform in the middle developed a significant bow to it [probably due to absorbing water from the paint], but by the time I'd noticed it it was too late to really do much about it.)

There's also a lot of other nifty artworks, but I don't want to spoil all the surprises for people who can still go see it! (Plus I was so absorbed in admiring them that I forgot to get pictures of a lot of them.) I'm almost certainly going to visit again while the exhibition is open, so perhaps closer to the end I can put up a few more pictures. A hui hou!

Arty Astros

For anyone who's going to be in Melbourne between May 12th and July 1st, there's going to be an art exhibition happening in Hawthorn, and I'm going to be in it!

Yes, I haven't mentioned it here before, but for the past three months I've been working on a model of the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array where I worked last year to exhibit in DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER, an exhibition of astronomically-inspired artwork. It's opening on May 12, from 2–4 PM, and it's free (and includes free food and drinks!); anyone's welcome to attend, the gallery merely asks that you reserve a spot (at the link above) so they can get an idea of refreshments needed. I'll be there along with several of the other artists to talk about our various projects.

To explain how this came about, I have to go back to last year. Several of the faculty and students here at the College of Astrophysics and Supercomputing (CAS) at Swinburne are involved in a project called Deeper Wider Faster, where telescopes around the world coordinate to observe a selected patch of sky for a few nights in an attempt to catch the transient events that occur in astronomy. Perhaps a star in its death throes, exploding as a supernova millions of light-years away. Or maybe a fast radio burst, an enigmatic phenomenon lasting mere milliseconds whose origins are still shrouded in mystery. Or maybe just a previously undiscovered asteroid! (They find a lot of those.) These collaborative multi-night sessions have been happening every couple of months for over a year now. (I attended one myself for a few hours earlier this year, though my schedule unfortunately precluded me from staying longer that time.)

Now, CAS also has two in-house artists, two wonderfully creative ladies by the names of Carolyn and Pam. They attended a Deeper Wider Faster session last year and were impressed with the sheer amount of incoming data and all the technology and work that went into making it happen, and soon after, by chance, were able to secure an exhibition slot with an art gallery literally across the street from Swinburne. This was around the end of the year, so with only a few scant months to get ready they put out a call for any astronomers in Swinburne who wanted to contribute some form of astronomically-inspired artwork with themselves as mentors.

I and several other students answered the call, so since the middle of February we've been working at weekly Wednesday night sessions on projects ranging from prosaic (models of several different telescopes) to the more fanciful (models of black and white holes, or a mobile representing the red/blue shifts seen in a rotating galaxy, or painting representing explosions in space). Other students made models of some rather famous telescopes (I'm actually really impressed by the models of the James Webb Space Telescope and the two Keck telescopes that people made), but I decided to make something a little smaller and closer to my heart: a model of the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array where I worked last year as a telescope operator. It's quite different from what people think of when they think of telescopes, so I figured it'd make for a great model. I also took pictures along the way, so you can experience the process of creation with me!

I started off with a pretty clear vision of what I wanted to do, and you can see a lot of what would make it into the final model in this picture from the second session in February. I had an idea of using sections of toilet-paper tubes for the baffles around the dishes right from the start, and while picking up supplies from the art store next to Swinburne campus I picked up some balsa wood rods (in two diameters) for the legs, a block of Styrofoam for the base, and a sheet of some kind of foam-board for the dish platform. I knew I wanted to get just the telescope and its base, not the canopy or any of the surrounding structure, which was a good choice in retrospect—finishing the telescope itself took long enough. In the picture above you can see the seven future radio dishes, and the half-painted telescope legs drying.

In March I cut the platform out of the foam board and learned how to draw a hexagon with nothing but a compass (another student made a model of the JWST with its many hexagonal mirror segments, and became something of an expert at constructing them over this time period). That was actually really cool—practical geometry! You can also see the legs fully painted drying next to my elbow.

I then cut out some wedges to represent the fact that the platform isn't a monolithic slab, but instead has a lot of negative space to cut down on weight. This was a slow and finicky process, as whatever material the foam is made of it pretty bad at being cut with a razor blade. This problem was solved, however, at the next session…

…where Carolyn introduced me to a tool I affectionately call “The Lightsaber.” It's an incredibly simple design—I think she got it for $2—and I was completely skeptical of its utility at first, but after the first few seconds of trying it I became an instant convert. The design is simple: the two arms hold a thin wire between them, a C battery is inserted, and pushing a thumb button closes the loop and heats up the wire, allowing it to slice through Styrofoam like hot butter. Seriously, there's no discernible resistance when cutting Styrofoam with a fresh battery in the thing, which is a freaky feeling. The foam of the foam board proved slightly slower to cut, but still melts incredibly quickly. This made it really, really easy for me to cut foam to shape, and ended up being responsible for a surprising amount of the final model.

I also painted the platform and used a strip of flexible foam around the outside to make the outer edge. I was constantly surprised how much a difference the proper color made to my brain's acceptance of the model's fidelity…though in this case I realized a few days ago while looking at photos for reference that contrary to my memory the platform's actually white, not gray. Oh well, I think it looks better this way. (You can see a whole bunch of golden hexagons in the background that were part of the JWST model design process.)

One big issue I struggled with throughout March was how to make the conic base of the YTLA. I bought a large block of Styrofoam back at the beginning intending to cut out a cone and use that, but realized that would be very difficult to pull off. By April however Carolyn (the mentor for those of us doing models) had the idea to use a simple rectangular cube for the base, which I then decided to disguise with panels to make a low-resolution approximation to a circular cone. I realized that it didn't matter that much if the model were perfectly, 100% accurate, and settled for an octagonal cone in the end. (You can just see the Styrofoam block peeking out in this photo.)

By the end of April I'd added some support sticks around the outside and the safety fence around the working platform (though I haven't added the access stairs it has in reality), and you can see the beginnings of the panels around the base, not yet glued in place or fitted. Also, the exhibition was starting in less than two weeks and I was only starting to get finished!

Luckily, in our final weekly workshop I was able to get the structure finished, by carefully slicing the panels around the base to fit and gluing them in. Then it was just a matter of detail, so for several nights last week I stayed at uni far into the night, adding bits of machinery and equipment and wires and cables and all the little symmetry-breaking details that the real thing has.

And here it is, set up on its own little plinth in the gallery awaiting the opening day! I'm not 100% done with it yet—I'm planning to go in at lunch later this week and add a few more machinery bits and wires to the underside—but I'm basically happy with it now. It's at the point where it's essentially finished, there's just always more detail to add. Adding details is my favorite part of building things, and I wish I'd had a few more weeks to indulge in it, but still, it came out pretty well for the remarkably short time (according to Carolyn and Pam) that we had to put things together.

Here's a shot from the side, showing my attempts to mimic the chaotic vortex of cables of wires on the real thing. I didn't capture it by a long shot, but what's there definitely makes the whole thing seem so much more…well, maybe “alive” is the wrong word, but it definitely makes it look better.

So yeah, I'm going to be an actual exhibited artist in an exhibition and everything! (I should put this on my CV.) Not bad for an astrophysics grad student. It's almost like doing a mini-PhD in a way: working on a project under the guidance of a mentor, except I can envision the whole thing at once in my head, know where to go at all stages and what to work on next, make tangible progress each week…okay, so it's basically nothing like doing a PhD!

Pam and Carolyn have tossed around the idea of making the weekly art workshops a regular but more open-ended thing after the exhibition for those who want to attend, and it's quite an appealing idea. It's a great stress-reliever to be working on an art project along with other people, and those of us who stuck with it to the end have forged a real bond through helping each other out with supplies, knowledge, or just a helping hand. I've discovered a serious love of painting over the course of putting this model together, so maybe I'll try my hand at just doing that if this happens…

Anyway, if you'd like to come down to see my model, or the seriously impressive models and paintings of my fellow “arty astros” (as Carolyn was fond of calling us), stop by the Town Hall Gallery in Hawthorn for the DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER exhibition before the end of June!