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!