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:

Hawaiʻi island from the north, maybe ~5–6,000 meters up. I ran out of room to show Kohala at the bottom.

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!

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!

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!

A picture that didn't make it into the video but I thought was fun.