Sizing koa saplings

Yesterday I went back up to the State Tree Nursery in Waimea to volunteer again (after my first time there three weeks earlier). I had thought we'd be doing the same thing, but discovered we were doing something a little different this time. Instead of transplanting seedlings from their germination beds into individual growing containers, we had trays of already-transplanted saplings several months old, and were dividing them by size (and spacing them out a little more) to help the smaller ones grow better without getting shading out by the taller ones.

(When does a seedling become a sapling, anyway? I guess that's a bit like asking when a baby becomes a child…)

(Oh, and happy Thanksgiving!)

This photo shows the process: on the right, a tray of saplings of various sizes, which I sorted into the four trays on the table. (I started with three size categories, but found four worked slightly better after some experience, which is why they go second-smallest/largest/second-largest/smallest from left to right.) We also gave them a bit of fertilizer, and removed any weeds that had sprouted. It was a rather meditative (and surprisingly satisfying) experience, as I quickly became proficient at sizing saplings and there was a hydroponic setup with some gently recirculating water that made it a very low-stress, soothing time. Perhaps as a result I didn't bother counting closely, but we probably handled some two thousand or so saplings over the course of the morning, finishing about 1:30 in the afternoon.

One other interesting thing I got to see was koa seeds (above). Koa is in the Fabaceae or pea family, and forms little leguminous seed pods which contain the seeds, which are about the size of a soybean, though a lot flatter.

Anyway, that's all the volunteering for the Mauna Kea Forest Restoration Project I have for now; the volunteering opportunities they have aren't spread evenly throughout the year, but tend to bunch up somewhat. I asked about the saplings I helped sort yesterday, and was told they'll probably be planted next spring in a few months, so who knows, I might get a chance to help put them in the ground come that time. We'll see! A hui hou!

Transplanting koa seedlings

Last week I had the opportunity to volunteer at the State Tree Nursery over in Waimea. We were helping transplant koa seedling from their germination beds into individual containers, to grow up a bit more before being used for reforestation efforts on Maunakea next year. If you remember when I volunteered to go planting back in the spring, this is where those saplings we were planting came from. It was interesting to see that, a bit like reading a prequel story. 

Here's a photo of what we were working with – hundreds of seedlings, germinated together in a bed on a table.

Each went into its own individual container, to grow until they're about waist height and ready for outplanting.

And here's how many we had left at the end of the day! I know I personally filled six racks of fifty containers each (plus helped fill a few more), so between volunteers and staff that were there that day we probably transplanted over two thousand seedlings, easily. Not all of them will survive when planted in the wild, but that's still quite a few trees that will go out next year! And this was just one day of four – I'll be heading back on the 27th for another day of transplanting.

In fact, as I took Old Saddle Road to Waimea in the morning, I drove by where I'd helped plant saplings earlier this year and caught glimpses of some of them in passing. I don't know how long koa take to grow – I imagine it's on the order of decades – so it'll probably be a while until they're majestic trees, but it was inspiring to see them growing there. Hopefully I'll have more opportunities to help with planting in the future. A hui hou!

Catching Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS

Tuesday evening I drove up Maunakea to the Visitor Information Station to see if I could spot Comet C/2023 A3, a.k.a. Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS. I hadn't felt particularly motivated to get up before dawn to see it earlier, but now that it's in the evening sky I figured I'd see if I could spot it.

For an astronomer, I'm a little embarrassed at how few comets I've actually seen. While solar eclipses (which I actually have never seen) either land in very out-of-the-way places or come at inconvenient times when I'm scrambling not to spend money on travel, I haven't lacked for chances over the past few decades to see comets (though a few, like Comet NEOWISE in 2020, did come at times when I wasn't really able to get somewhere dark enough to see them). Still, I don't have much excuse for missing Comet McNaught in 2007 or Comet Lovejoy in 2011. I did see Comet Holmes' remarkable brightening in 2007, though that was an unusual comet since we were seeing it almost head-on, so it didn't really display much of a tail. There are probably a few more I missed in that time span as well which I've forgotten; on the whole, I have a pretty poor track record of seeing naked-eye comets even when presented with the opportunity.

Which is why I found myself yesterday trudging up the path to the top of Puʻu Kalepeamoa in some extremely strong (and frigid) winds, setting up my GoPro for a timelapse, and waiting for the sunset. The timelapse didn't quite work out as planned since it failed to adjust the exposure time properly after it got dark, but I managed to get some photos, at least. 

The setting Sun through a māmane tree. They're in bloom this time of year.

The nearly-full Moon, unfortunately, wasn't doing the comet any favors as it lit up the night sky. I was first able to make it out maybe a half hour after sunset, then as twilight faded it became easily visible for perhaps another hour or so; by the time I left, nearly two hours after sunset, it was getting low enough on the horizon to be difficult to make out again.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Hualālai, with Venus at left.

With that, I can finally say that I've seen a proper, honest-to-goodness hairy star, and I have the pictures to prove it. Speaking of, I got those shots with my Pixel 7 Pro; not as good as a professional camera, but it's still remarkable to me just how good the software and hardware in phones has gotten, that it can capture shots like this in low light. (I did set it up on a tripod for stability, but still.)

Overall it was an interesting experience, and I'm glad I made the effort to see it. (Though after sitting out in those winds, maybe I should've gotten up to see it before dawn from Hilo, where it'd be warm[er] and humid instead of frigid and parched…) It should still be visible for a little while, perhaps the next few weeks; the Moon will start rising later and it'll be getting higher above the horizon, which will both make it easier to see, but it's also receding from the Sun which will make it get fainter, so there's a tension between the various effects. The next few days should still be good, though, and I'd recommend making the effort if you haven't seen it. I probably won't head up Maunakea again, but I'll try to keep an eye out for it from Hilo as it rises high enough now to be seen above the western horizon. A hui hou!

Last day at Gemini

Today was my last day at Gemini, officially ending three years since I began there. I found myself leaving with a complex superposition of emotions; sadness at leaving a job I've enjoyed and the friends I made there, yet also a sense of peace that it was finally done, relief that I don't need to wake up to an alarm tomorrow, and – just maybe – the faintest spark of excitement for what comes next. We had a farewell lunch for me (with a cake!) on the lanai, which was nice. Someone found out it was my last day there and said something to the effect of, “Oh! Not taking any vacation days off at the end?” To which I replied (entirely sincerely) that the thought hadn't entered my head when there was still so much work to get done before I left, which our team coordinator told me she got a kick out of afterwards.

The work I've put into DRAGONS won't be coming out very soon; the most recent estimate I heard is that the version containing it might come out September 2025, so it'll be a while before you can be reducing your own near-infrared spectroscopy data using my work. It's somewhat bittersweet to have spent three years working on something and to have to leave before it's even come out for people to use, but I suppose I'm hardly the first programmer to have that happen. And at least it will be released rather than get canceled without ever seeing the light of day, as happens all to often in the programming world. Thankfully things went smoothly and I was able to mostly wrap up what I wanted to and leave the code in a working state; I spent my final three days writing one last test for the GNIRS cross-dispersed data reduction and using it to make one final tweak to make things a bit simpler and more elegant. There are a few remaining issues, but I spent the two weeks prior carefully investigating them and writing down what needs to be done about them (they were a bit too involved for me to start at that point). I know the code's in good hands, at least, though progress will probably be slower now that I've left.

As to what does come next? No idea. I didn't get the Gemini telescope operator position, and since I haven't heard back from the other two places I'm assuming nothing is forthcoming on those fronts. (From conversations I've had since then, ghosting unsuccessful job applicants seems to be the new standard, even after an interview.) With more free time on my hands and no more stress about wrapping things up successfully, I'm planning to go at the job hunting with more vigor. I've got a few astronomical opportunities that seem a pretty close fit that I've either applied to or am planning to apply to (though they're open till the end of the month so I won't hear back for weeks if at all), and I'm also going to be looking around locally outside of astronomy to see what's available. I've got a few leads and contacts, so we'll see how that goes.

But for the next few days, at least, I plan to rest; considering I went straight from submitting my thesis to working at Gemini, I haven't taken more than about two weeks off at a time for over seven years at this point. I have no lack of hobbies I'd like to take up again, new skills I'd like to learn, and other ways to occupy my time outside of job hunting, and I think it's high time for me to take a well-earned (if externally-imposed) break. Maybe I'll get some more posts out of it too, we'll see! A hui hou!

Some thoughts on the Rings of Power

The title of this post has something of a double-meaning today, as I felt like discussing both Amazon's Rings of Power and the self-same rings of power as Tolkien originally conceived them. Now, I'l begin by saying I haven't actually seen Rings of Power, but I've read a number of articles written about it. From what I've read I am generally of the opinion that I'm not missing much, due to a number of changes from the source material which seem to be made solely for the sake of change rather than out of necessity.  People may defend an adaptation by saying that changes must be made; I don't think any sane person would deny that, but not all changes are equal. Or good. I'm not here to quibble with every change made (indeed, not having watched the show, I can hardly do so, and some are fine), but there are some which seem primarily for the sake of cheap drama rather than from a place of measured consideration of what deeper themes Tolkien intended his work to say.

The particulare change which indirectly sparked this post was this: in Tolkien's work, the three rings of power which end up going to the Elves are completed last, using the knowledge learned from Sauron (in his guise as Annatar, Lord of Gifts), but without him being directly involved as with the previous sixteen rings (which eventually get split up seven to the Dwarves and nine to Men). The three Elven rings – Narya, Nenya, and Vilya – are therefore unsullied by Sauron, and could be used safely as long as Sauron didn't possess the One Ring. 

Rings of Power, instead, has switched things around to have the three be forged first by Celebrimbor with Sauron's direct involvement, in what seems like an attempt to generate cheap drama by having the Elves debate about whether they should use them or not, ultimately deciding to do so and having it (seemingly so far) turn out all right. This, of course, runs completely counter to Tolkien's view, where the instruments of evil (such as the One Ring), even if wielded for the best of purposes and with the purest of motives, inevitably corrupt their wielders with a desire for ever-more power and domination. We need look no further than Gandalf and Galadrial's reactions to being offered the One Ring; they both are wise enough to recognize that while they would initially take it up with the best of intentions, in time they would become tyrants to rival Sauron.

But how, in Tolkien's work, did Sauron get the Elves of Eregion to work with him in forging the rings of power in the first place if they proved so dangerous? I was recently thinking about this (read: my brain obsessively decided to focus on this at 4 AM in the morning when I woke up one night after reading Tolkien's essay On Fairy-stories before bed), and I have some thoughts.

The Second Age, in Tolkien's legendarium, was an age of, if not necessarily decay, at least a bit of a slow burn; after the high and heroic deeds of the First Age, ending in the fall and banishment of Morgoth, the Second Age starts out hopeful: the Númenóreans have their island home of Númenór (granted by the Valar as reward for their help), and after the cataclysmic battle against Morgoth the rest of Middle-Earth has peace again, with evil seemingly defeated. But over the centuries and millennia, it become clear that cracks are forming in this idyllic vision; as the average lifespan of the Númenóreans slowly dwindles, they start to become more and more afraid of death, ending ultimately in Ar-Pharazôn's catastrophic attempt (provoked by Sauron) to invade the Undying Lands. Sauron, having escaped the overthrow of his master, lay low for centuries but eventually begins to stir again, fortifying Mordor as his stronghold and seeking to extend his power and influence. The Elves, in general, are not doing a whole lot during this time (though the friendship between the Elves of Eregion and the Dwarves of Khazad-Dûm is notable); after the great deeds of the First Age, they seem to enter something of a holding pattern, more interested in preserving what is rather than making new things.

And this, I think, gives a clue as to how Sauron was able to trick the Elves' best and brightest into forging what would become some of his most potent weapons. His endgame was always Domination; the forceful overwriting of others' wills with his own, as seen most vividly with the Nazgûl, or Ringwraiths. But he could disguise this desire by presenting the rings as agents of Preservation, which the Elves were interested in. The error of the Elves lay in not recognizing that Preservation of things beyond their natural state or lifetime is but little removed from Domination. Preserving may seem to be “freezing things in time,” but what it must actually be is a series of changes undoing those done by time, just as a pure tone may be canceled out by playing another of the same frequency but 180° out of phase with it.

Sauron thus essentially had a backdoor in every ring that was forged; they were already latent instruments of domination, of the imposing of the will upon Nature and Others beyond the natural state. In forging the One Ring to control them he simply, as it were, revealed their true nature and the trap the Elves had fallen into. While the Three were forged without his direct involvement and thus bore no direct taint, even they had the fatal flaw of the others (and could be suborned) because they were built on the same principles and along the same lines. When the Elves perceived this treachery on Sauron's part they removed their rings, and did not wear them again until Sauron was overthrown and the One Ring was lost (closing out the Second Age in the process), but he was able to use the sixteen already made – to devastating effect in the case of the Ringwraiths.

(As an aside, the rings given to the Dwarves don't seem to have had much effect on them, beyond inflaming their natural desire for gold and perhaps extending their lives somewhat. Sauron, as a Maia, was once the student of Aulë, the Vala who created the Dwarves in anticipation of the coming of Men; and perhaps here we may see where the pupil's craft proved unable to surpass the master's.)

It's a shame that Rings of Power doesn't seem interested in telling this arresting tale – of Sauron cunningly working on the Elven smiths of Eregion, promising (real) knowledge and power to help keep things as they are and arrest their natural decay, while secretly sowing the seeds of destruction and domination. A nuanced discussion of when to Preserve and when to let go could have been had, and what the proper place of Magic (really, Technology) is in so doing; but instead we get a flipping of the rings' forging order seemingly for the sake of some cheap drama and uncertainty, without any deeper thought as to what the ramifications of such a change would mean or how the lesson imparted might end up entirely at odds with Tolkien's intended one. It is not (from what I have gleaned) the first such change in Rings of Power, and it will probably not be the last.

What should we take away from all this? One possible moral might be that since Preservation is not so far removed from Domination we shouldn't try to preserve Tolkien, and accept whatever changes others make. I feel, however, that this would be missing a key point: that there is a proper and an improper use of, and time for, preservation. The rings' powers only became problematic when they tried to preserve something beyond its natural state or limit; they did not provide more life, but merely an extension of it, being stretched ever thinner. As Bilbo said, beginning to feel the effects, it was like being “butter, spread over too much bread,” a discomfort which would eventually stretch into a torment had he not freely given up the ring.

But there is still a use for Preservation, when it does not seek to preserve things too far. Elrond in Rivendell and Galadrial in Lórien both preserve their respective locations throughout the Third Age, but when the One Ring was unmade, the Third Age ended, and the Elves knew that the time of Men was come and the time of the Elves was ending, they willingly surrendered their attempts at preservation to higher powers and departed Middle-Earth for Valinor. Tolkien knew and accepted that people would build upon the foundation he laid; but I think there is still room to critique the additions and see if they measure up to what came before, without declaring the entire edifice untouchable and eternally fixed. Preserving Good in the world and not letting it fall into ruin before its time is good, as long as the focus remains on the Good and not solely on the Preserving, as such; a trap, as Tolkien reminds us, all-too-easy to fall into.

Touring an oceanic research vessel

Back on the 11th I had the opportunity to take a tour of the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer, the only federal ship dedicated to mapping and exploring the deep sea and sea floor while it was in port in Hilo. (This was through Gemini; some of the ship's crew got a return tour of the telescope a few days later.) The ship itself is a converted former Navy submarine hunter, making it perfect for running quietly while carrying out sonar mapping.

View from in front of the bow.

The Okeanos Explorer can carry and deploy underwater vehicles equipped with lights, video feeds, arms for grabbing samples, and more, and livestream their underwater expeditions. I've come across clips from them on YouTube before, so it was really neat getting to see where those discoveries came from.

Starboard side of roughly the latter half of the ship.

You might have heard about the Okeanos Explorer from when their discovery of a mysterious golden-colored egg on the ocean floor briefly went viral earlier this year. It was about the size of an emu egg and had a hole where something had hatched, but no one was able to identify what species it might have come from, which gave it an evocative, mysterious appeal that made it briefly famous. So far it still hasn't been identified; I asked our guide about it, and found out she'd been the one who bagged it up when it was collected for study, so “all the world was going crazy about this thing, and I had it in a Zip-loc bag full of ethanol,” as she put it.

The control room for the underwater vehicles, and livestreaming the expeditions.

We got a lot of interesting information over the course of an hour and a half; the ship had been in the Pacific several years ago, but had then been in the Atlantic the past few years, and is now back in the Pacific for a few years on its first expedition of several (though it doesn't have underwater vehicles for this one, it's a mapping expedition instead). It left harbor sometime over the weekend on a ten-day voyage to where it will have begun its mapping by now in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to the north-west. It was supposed to leave at 0830 Saturday morning, and I was hoping to catch it with my drone when it did from the lookout point on the west side of the bay, but something must've come up since it still hadn't left the dock after an hour and a half. I found out I could zoom in with my phone and make it out at dock (from several kilometers away!), which resulted in some shots like the one below artistically framed by a vine in the foreground.

The Okeanos Explorer at dock (the white ball near center is its radar dome).

Overall it was a really interesting tour and I'm glad I got to go. One thing that struck me was how a number of aspects of running a science ship like that mirrored running an observatory; one major parallel was how the weather dictates the schedule for both, but there were a number of other little similarities as well. It was fascinating to hear about the work they do, especially with having previously seen video clips taken from the ship. I guess that's another parallel to astronomy: trying to engage the public and share the knowledge they're gaining. Which I thought was pretty inspiring. A hui hou!

Painting a solar filament

I haven't done much painting since moving back to Hawaii. I'm not sure why, other than that I just haven't felt very motivated to do it; perhaps because it started as something of a social activity in Australia and I haven't replicated that feeling here. However, back in May, the Astronomy Picture of the Day website had an image of the Sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory which really inspired me. It showed the limb of the Sun with a filament stretching out from behind it towards the foreground, which gave it a strong sense of three-dimensionality – something often lacking in astronomical images. I thought I'd take a shot at painting something like it, leading to the painting below:

Solar Filament, 12"×18", acrylic on canvas.

I'm not entirely happy with how it turned out – especially when comparing to the infinitely more dynamic and vibrant inspiration – but I've learned that sometimes it's best just to draw a line under something, take the lessons learned, and move on, rather than striving in vain for perfection. Though for being the first moderately intricate thing I've painted in a few years now, I'm also not too unhappy with it. I learned (and relearned!) multiple things about painting while working on it, which I'm sure will come in handy the next time I feel like painting a star.

I tried to replicate the colors from the reference images somewhat, such as having the hottest parts of the surface be white. It didn't quite come out like I'd hoped, which actually characterizes a fair amount of my color-mixing experiments over the course of this painting – but in the process I remembered how much fun it is mix colors, to arrange them as I like, and the physical application of paint on a surface. Speaking of surfaces, that's one thing I think did go well: before coloring the Sun, I laid down a thin layer of flexible modeling past, then lightly tapped all over it with my finger to create an appropriately fractal, rough surface. (I later realized I should've done something similar where the filament goes beyond the solar limb and had to improvise with some stiff paint, but that's part of the learning process!)

In-progress image showing the texture on the Sun's surface.

I thought about using glass beads like some of my previous stars, but it didn't quite feel right for this painting, and I think that was right call in the end. Overall, I'm happy enough with it to share it here, and it has reminded me of the simple joy of painting. I don't know what I'll paint next, or when, but I do have a few ideas rattling around in my head, so we'll see where things go. A hui hou!

Windy wet weather

This weekend was wet and windy as the center of tropical storm/hurricane Hone passed just to the south of the island. (It upgraded in status a short while before its closest approach.) According to the 48-hour rainfall map I saw Hilo got about 8-10 inches, so the rivers have been running high. After work yesterday I drove up to Waiʻale Falls, and found the lighting rather evocative above the raging river:

Waiʻale Falls, swollen with recent rain.

Thankfully, damage was fairly minor within Hilo from what I've seen. Around 5,000 people lost power according to HECO, but that seems to have been mostly outside Hilo in more rural areas, and all but about 400 had it restored by this morning. I heard a transformer blow not too far away (it made a tremendous noise), but never lost power. We've got another storm (Gilma) projected to pass by north of this island later this week (perhaps hitting the rest of the chain more square-on), but it was just downgraded from a hurricane in the last day or so and is expected to get weaker and not cause any significant effects here. All just part of hurricane season in Hawaii!

In other news, I found out last week that I didn't get the Gemini telescope operator job; from the message I got they went with someone currently working as a telescope operator, which certainly makes a lot of sense. That's pretty much the last nail in the coffin for me sticking on with Gemini, so I've been adjusting to that. I'm still waiting to hear back from the other two interviews I had, despite sending some gently querying emails about a week ago. I know things can move slowly, and no news can be good news at this stage, but I'm a bit surprised not to have heard anything. Still, not much to do for it except wait (and maybe see about putting in some more applications…). A hui hou!

Calculating collision damage as falling damage in D&D

I recently saw a discussion on a forum I visit about how much damage a creature would take in Dungeons & Dragons from running into a wall at a hundred miles per hour, with someone noting that there's no formal rules covering collisions, but that it could be modeled using the rules for falling damage. This sparked my curiosity, and I ended up deriving a formula for collision damage as a function of velocity which I thought was interesting enough to share here.

First, our starting assumptions: falling damage in D&D is modeled fairly simply as 1d6 per 10 feet fallen, up to a maximum of 20d6 at 200 feet. We're going to take this model as a given (including ignoring air resistance) rather than investigating it more closely here (though while looking things up I found a post examining it which suggests it's actually a decent approximation). However, it models damage in height fallen rather than speed of impact at the end of a fall, which is the value of interest for modeling (horizontal) collision damage.

Here's where the equations of motion come through for us: we assume a creature falling from some height \(r_0\) with an initial velocity \(v_0\) of zero comes to a stop at a height \(r\) of zero with a final velocity \(v\) entirely under the acceleration due to gravity \(g\) (\(-9.8\) m/s², or \(-32\) ft/s²). Equation [4] has all the variables we need:

\[v^2=v_0^2+2a(r-r_0)\]

We can rearrange this (substituting \(g\) for \(a\)) to get

\[r_0=\frac{v^2-v_0^2}{2g}-r,\]

and since both \(v_0\) and \(r\) are zero in this situation, it becomes even simpler:

\[r_0=-v^2/2g.\]

(Remember that \(g\) is negative so the final result is positive.) It then becomes a matter of unit conversions, since \(r_0\) needs to be in feet. With \(g\) in ft/s², we just need to convert velocity from the more familiar miles per hour into feet per second. 5280 ft/mi / 3600 s in a hour equals a conversion factor of 1.47, so for velocity in miles per hour we have (leaving out the units):

\[r_0=\frac{(1.47\cdot v)^2}{64}.\]

(If you want to use it with ft/s, just don't multiply by 1.47.) Putting in 100 mph for \(v\) gives a starting height of 337.6 feet, which is above the 200 foot cutoff for maximum damage; one could either rule that a creature hitting a wall at that speed just takes 20d6, or keep extending the model out and take 33d6. (If you use the maximum damage model, the cutoff point is almost exactly 77 mph or 113 ft/s – anything moving faster just takes the max damage.)

How applicable is this in normal combat? Probably not very; the normal move speed of a player character is typically 30 feet per round. Rounds are 6 seconds, so that comes to 5 ft/s, or a leisurely 3.4 mph, slightly faster than normal walking speed. Generally players can run at twice that speed (at the expense of not performing other actions), which is still only 10 ft/s, or 6.8 mph, a gentle jogging pace. How much damage would a player take from running full-tilt into a wall at that speed? None, it turns out, as it would be equivalent to a fall of a mere 1.5 feet, nowhere close to the minimum 10-foot threshold to take damage. The original hypothetical was about a flying dragon, which makes a bit more sense to be speeding around, but most creatures probably aren't moving fast enough to warrant collision damage in most circumstances. Still, the formula above will allow you to calculate it should the situation ever arise, and I present it to do with as you will. A hui hou!

Updates and interviews

This will be fairly short life update, as today I finished the third of three job interviews in the span of less than a week. This is new territory for me, as I've never actually had multiple job applications out like this before, and the stress of preparing for multiple interviews has been rather occupying my mind for the past few weeks. I also managed to miss one of them entirely last week by getting the time difference between California and Hawaii backwards (which certainly didn't help my stress levels!), though thankfully they rescheduled it to today. (Yes, this is a time difference I've been handling routinely for over a decade…including over the International Date Line while I was in Australia…and which I checked online to make sure I had correct…)

I won't go into too much detail about the various jobs since I don't know if any of them will actually pan out, though I do think all three interviews went pretty well. In the order I had the interviews for them, the first job would be the most different from what I'm currently doing but also involve staying in Hilo and be the least disruptive overall. The second would keep me on the island (just not in Hilo) and be closer to what I currently do, while the third would be the closest, but involve moving to California.

All of which makes it rather difficult to choose; I quite like what I do now (full-time software development), but I'd also really like not to have to move. I won't hear back for a few weeks though, so that's a (possible) decision I don't have to make just yet at least. I've been weighing different possibilities and option in my mind for days now, but ultimately I'll just have to wait and see what offers (if any) I get. It's now less than three months until my time with Gemini is up, so whatever happens things will be changing for me in the near future. (I checked, and my last day is officially October 9th.) I suppose, if nothing else, it'll give me some new things to write about! A hui hou!

A late tau day, and some cruise ship photos

First of all, happy belated Tau Day! I remembered to bring it up at work on Friday and forgot to note it here. I'm going to blame the bout of COVID-19 I had last week making me a bit scatter-brained.

Second, two weeks ago I went flying over the bay with the intent of catching a cruise ship leaving in a hyperlapse. I actually managed to pull off a pretty good one, where I got my drone to focus on the ship while executing a sideways move, creating a very dynamic video. However, the experience has also cemented my previous opinion that hyperlapses involving the ocean just fundamentally don't work, at least with the Mini 3 Pro where the fastest interval between frames is two seconds (for reference, that rate compresses fifty seconds' worth of time into each second of the hyperlapse, at 25 fps). Going over land, that frequency isn't a big deal, as the land itself generally isn't moving noticeably so any movement comes from the drone. Over the ocean, though, the surface waves which are so slow and relaxing in real-time become a series of flickering monstrosities when sped up fifty times. It's not something that can be handled by, say, slowing the drone's speed, because it's inherently part of the environment. Perhaps if I can slow it down a bit I'll share it, because it's otherwise a pretty neat clip, but I just don't like how the waves look when sped up that much.

I did take a few normal video clips of the ship as it got out of the harbor and onto the open sea, and while they don't really come together into a cohesive video I at least managed to get some interesting still frames from them that I wanted to share:

I quite like how the ship's silhouette carves into the Sun's reflection.

A top-down view of the pool as I flew over.

Looking back towards shore.

And out towards the open ocean. Full steam ahead!

I've mentioned on this blog that it's been a very rainy winter and spring here in Hilo so far this year, and even now as we get into summer we still have a lot of overcast and rainy days. (I'm not complaining, as it keeps things cooler with the AC out at work.) We have, however, started to have some more sunny and clear days like this one recorded here, and it's been nice to get out and fly again after not flying at all in May. I'm looking forward to doing more flying in the near future, so we'll see what that produces (there's a waterfall I've been wanting to revisit for months now). A hui hou!

Dice, and the towers they roll down

I've been meaning to share this incredible dice tower my friend Graham 3D-printed for me for my birthday for a few weeks now, so let me finally do so:

I realize now I should probably have shown something for scale, but it's a good eight or ten inches tall, and large enough for “normal” sized dice to clatter down the stairs with ease. (I tried getting a photo of them in motion, but they descend so fast that they're just a blur!)

Now while you can use a dice tower for anything that involves rolling dice, as a way of ensuring a good random roll or just for the fun of watching the dice fly down, in this case it was because I finally had a nice set of dice worth rolling. (Very) long time readers of this blog may remember this post from all the way back in 2011, where I (badly) modeled a set of polyhedral dice and mentioned that I'd long admired the amazing designs of polyhedral dice that exist, but never really had a reason to get some of my own. Well, I finally picked up a set a few months ago from Die Hard Dice, which has a lot of really neat options such as this Mythica Copper Aquamarine set that I got:

They're made from a zinc-alloy with an electroplated copper finish, and if, like me, you've only rolled plastic dice in your life they'll feel surprisingly hefty, rolling with a good hearty ‘thunk.’ Not directly on a table top as they'd probably put a good dent in it, which is another purpose of dice towers now that I think about it. (There are also a few additional dice in the set such as a pair of ten-sided dice, but I wanted to focus on the Platonic shapes in this photo.)

The reason I finally got a set of polyhedrals is because a friend I know from board gaming invited me to a game he's running with a rather interesting premise: he's created an original fantasy world where he wants to have various games progress through time, with this particular time period involving small parties scouting out an unknown land mass. I'm one of over a dozen players, with the idea being that people organically form parties together based on what parts of the world they want to explore together (so one group might scout a river glimpsed to the north, while another scouts a ruined city to the east, or magical glaciers to the south). Multiple parties are considered to be running simultaneously over two-week periods in-game (though individual sessions would be spread out and consist of no more than four players each), with the world progressing forward in time after each party has had a chance to go out and explore (and return and share their finding on a large shared map).

It piqued my interest since it hits upon my love of exploration and discovery, and it's been a lot of fun getting to play with different groups of people each time. We're using the Shadowdark rules, which keeps things relatively simple and moving along, and provide pressure and danger when outside of safe areas. (Indeed, my first character was already among the first casualties, when three-fourths of our group got killed in a nighttime encounter; we learned that climbing trees is not a good way to fight hostile humanoid frogs since they can just jump up there with you, then proceed to knock you out of the tree to take falling damage.) I've long been sort of “peripherally aware” of role-playing games and the stories they generate, and I've been having a blast finally getting to experience it in person. We'll see how it develops! A hui hou!

A belated birthday

Another year, another birthday, and I forgot to write my usual birthday blog post! And I'm 35 now, old enough to be president. This past week was a bit topsy-turvy and I even thought about it the night before, and just forgot. It was the annual board meeting at Gemini last week, which meant a number of additional people around, some sessions open to staff (which I mostly listened to in the background on Zoom while getting work done), some meetings with board members interested in talking to the staff, a team meeting for my team since my boss was out in Hilo, and just generally a lot of things out of the ordinary routine which threw me off.

And for added fun, the air conditioning has been out on the second floor (where my office is) for the past two weeks. It gets uncomfortably warm pretty quickly with the windows closed (due to a lot of electronics in the building generating heat), but thankfully the past two weeks have also had somewhat turbulent weather with a bit of breeze, so with the windows open and a fan on me it's not too bad. Hopefully we can get that fixed fairly soon, as we're around the time it transitions from the cooler/rainier winter weather to warmer summer weather. We've had some later-than-usual stormy weather this year (having lost time on the summit from storms this past week), but I imagine it'll start being hot and sunny pretty much any day now. Never a dull birthday here! A hui hou!

A new view of the Wailuku

It's been so rainy for the past few months that I haven't had many chances to put a drone in the air. Last Friday we had an absolute downpour of up to 3 inches per hour for a short time, which caused a pretty widespread power outage including at the Gemini offices. I heard of one person in Piʻihonua whose rain gauge went from empty to 7 inches over the course of the day. A few weeks ago the rain let up long enough for me to get in a flight, and while the lighting isn't the best as it was still overcast I thought the photos I got were interesting enough to share.

I've been vaguely aware that there's a small hydroelectric power station in Hilo on the Wailuku River for some years now (it gets mentioned in the occasional local news article), but didn't actually know where it was located. There's an electrical station next to the river near downtown which I thought was associated with it, but I recently learned that it's actually upstream, outside the city proper above Waiale Falls (in Piʻihonua, actually).

I'm pretty sure that's it in the photo below, given the water coming out (though I don't know where the intake is). It's not very large, which makes sense since the Wailuku, though it reliably flows all year, spends most of its time in a very low flow state that can't be providing that much energy. I found myself more enchanted by the rest of the scene, with the emerald-green grass and the Wailuku rising up the mountain side, a distant waterfall barely glimpsed in the distance. It's quite idyllic…though the invasive Molucca albizia trees growing on the right shore spoil the mood a bit. (They grow faster than native trees and crowd and shade them out, but are pretty fragile and easily drop large branches, making them dangerous during storms.)

Anyway, that's all for now. I just wanted to share a nice photo of a new part of the Wailuku I hadn't really explored before. A hui hou!

A review of “Hānau ka ua: Hawaiian rain names”

It's something of a journalistic cliché that Inuit languages have a very large number of words for snow (at least compared to English). The question of many words exactly isn't very meaningful, however, because in a sense it's comparing apples to oranges. Ultimately, reconstructed Proto-Inuit-Yupik has just three unique root words for types of snow, but Inuit languages, due to being more on the synthetic side of the analytic-synthetic spectrum than English is, can produce a practically unlimited number of words describing snow (or any other topic) in increasing detail. But these wouldn't be analogous to words as we'd think of them in English, but more like descriptive phrases.

While the Inuit may not actually have that many root words for snow, the indigenous Hawaiian people did have many different names for rain. Anyone who's lived in the Hawaiian islands for a while will be familiar with how the varied geography creates microclimates, and will understand how the rain can be very different from place to place, or even in the same place at different times or under different conditions. No surprise, then, that people who depended on the rain for water noticed those patterns and came up with names for different kinds of rain.

Last month I picked up the book Hānau ka ua: Hawaiian rain names, by Collette Leimomi Akana and Kiele Gonzalez. It contains over four hundred painstakingly-compiled names for different rains found in the islands, based on written accounts from the 19th and 20th centuries (including newspapers and letters). It's a pretty hefty book, as you can see below.

At 327 pages, this is not a small book.

The title “hānau ka ua” comes from a birth chant for Queen Emma that goes, “Hānau ke aliʻi, hānau ka ua me ka makani” (“The chiefess was born, the rain and wind, too, were born”). The introduction explains how important reading the weather was to ancient Hawaiians; some rains would be associated with particular seasons, which in turn might let people know that a particular kind of fish was available to catch. Some rains share the same name across islands, while other are tied to a specific location. A place might be known for a single type of rain found there, or it might have multiple rains associated with it; my favorite quote from the introduction is:

One place can have several rains. Hilo is home to at least fifty rains.

(Which, if you're keeping track, means around one-in-eight named rains are associated with Hilo.) The book is fantastic for someone like me with a grounding in (but not a mastery of) Hawaiian language, as it reproduces for each rain the original Hawaiian text where it was mentioned along with an English translation. This combination makes it fantastic for practicing one's Hawaiian reading comprehension, and I keep surprising myself with how much I remember from my year in undergrad.

When I bought this book, I had envisaged it something like a birding guide, a way to identify the many rains of Hilo and start checking them off some mental checklist. In this I have been disappointed, but I want to be very clear that that is not the fault of the book or the authors. It's a bit more depressing than that; you see, most of the references to rain names comes from 19th century writings, and many of them (at least as far as I've gotten in the book, though I see no reason to expect otherwise) are from popular sayings, mele (songs/chants), or other poetic utterances. They're not descriptions of what the rain is like, because the speaker/writer could be confident that the listener/reader would know what they were referring to; they didn't bother describing the rains because people already knew what they meant.

And that's a huge cache of cultural knowledge that has probably been lost to time! I'm not suggesting that everyone in the islands knew every name in the book; probably people knew the rains relevant to where they lived, plus probably some famous ones by reputation from other islands or places around their island. But such knowledge was primarily passed on orally, and with things like the suppression of the Hawaiian language in the late 19th and early 20th century, probably a lot of that knowledge was lost. Which is a real shame.

It's made even worse by the few descriptions of rains that do survive in the book, from things like letters or newspaper reports. I'm going to quote the English translation of one such description here, to give an idea of the specificity and detail that was involved. This is for the Alanilehua rain, which was associated with Hilo, Panaʻewa, and Puna:

Alanilehua Rain. This rain is sometimes called Wailehua. It is associated with the nectar of lehua blossoms. When this rain starts to come from the water's edge at Hāʻena and from above the upper heavens of that place, it will travel to the west, sprinkling the buds of Puna's hīnano blossoms and pouring down over the clusters of Panaʻewa's lehua trees. It won't ever come close to town, but these raindrops will appear outside of the western border of Panaʻewa. Then it turns and circles to the south, ascending the uplands of Pāʻieʻie, and disappearing within the watery mists of the forest. It has a delicate nature, is rarely seen, and is visible only between the hours of 10 and 12 in the morning.

From a description of rains by Lilia H. Richards and company, who traveled to the uplands of Puna in 1876. Hawaiian source: Richards et al. English trans. by author.

I adore this description for how much it says about the observation skills of the people who named it. The last sentence, in particular, really contextualizes it: it is “rarely seen,” and is only visible in a two-hour span, yet people noted it recurring enough times to sense a pattern and give it a name. I love the details of where it comes from, how it doesn't rain within the town but just outside it, and eventually turns and disappears up the slopes of Mauna Loa. It's a sheer delight to read about (especially in the original Hawaiian), and I can only imagine the similar descriptions that people must have shared in centuries past for all the other rains which are now no more than a memory of a name.

Still, I'm still less than halfway through the book at this point, and there are still many names to discover, and hopefully more descriptions that might start letting me put a name to the many rains I encounter here in Hilo (and elsewhere). Hānau ka ua won't necessarily serve as a birder's guide to rain, but it is still precious as a repository of what cultural knowledge remains about rain names, much of it poetic and beautiful in nature. If all that's piqued your interest, you can get a copy from Kamehameha Publishing here. And from an interview with the authors that I read, I'm looking forward to their next project, tentatively titled Hānau ka makani, a book of wind names; apparently they've already collected over six hundred of them. A hui hou!

Reforesting Mauna Kea

Last week I took the opportunity for a new experience: helping plant trees with the Mauna Kea Forest Restoration Project. For background, much of the high-elevation slopes of Mauna Kea was originally upland forest. A lot of that forest was later cleared for grazing cattle or as a result of grazing by invasive ungulate species; I don't know the exact details, but the point is that a lot of former upland forests is now upland grasslands. Montane prairie? (It does tend to remind me of the prairies of Nebraska when I'm up there, and a co-worker mentioned it reminded him of Scotland.) I'm sure there's a term for it.

Anyway, the location this time was the Kaʻohe Restoration Area on the west side of Mauna Kea about 6,000 feet (~1,800 meters) up. The area is part of the habitat range of the endangered palila, of which only a few hundred individuals remain (mostly in the wild, though there's also a captive breeding program). The hope is that, by restoring the forests that originally blanketed the mountain slopes, palila and other various endangered native birds will have more habitat available and able to expand their ranges. The area we were planting in was directly along the highway running between Saddle Road and Waimea, so it'll be easy to spot the trees growing in future while driving by.

Drone view from above Puʻu Ahumoa, a cinder cone up mauka (uphill) of where we were planting.

This time we were planting koa seedlings, a tree in the Acacia genus endemic to Hawaii famed as a hardwood for making canoes, surfboards, and other things (and unusual for being a thornless Acacia). The seedlings were either one or two years old (I think the latter), and already a few feet tall. We started with 800 seedlings, and despite having only about half the number of people who'd signed up we managed to plant 765 of them over the course of about five hours. (And only stopped because we ran out of gas for the portable hole drillers and didn't have a means to manually dig holes!)

My first tree planted!

Interestingly, I learned that koa have “baby” and “mature” leaves, though the mature type are not true leaves, but actually phyllodes – enlarged and flattened petioles (the leaf “stalk”) which take on the function of leaves. The photo below shows one of a few koa that had been planted in the same location last year to test how well they would grow, and shows both types of leaves on the same plant.

A ~3 year-old sapling showing different leaf types.

The weather was also interesting, being clear and sunny throughout the morning before a cloud rolled in over lunch turning everything misty and foggy (which was pretty typical, I learned from people who'd been there for a lot of plantings). Last year's archaeology experience gave me a good idea of how to prepare, though being well above rather than below sea level meant the sun was completely unforgiving. (I missed a patch of sunscreen just below one eye, with the resulting sunburn Wednesday morning looking humorously like I had a black eye.)

Me with seedlings after lunch, to get an idea of the scale.

All in all it was a fun experience, though my knees are still sore a week later from all the up-down-up-down involved. I'd definitely like to go again (after some time to recuperate), though probably not very often as the days it happens are unfortunately mostly during the week (though this occasion was on Prince Kuhio Day, a holiday, so I'll keep an eye out for opportunities). It feels nice to be part of regrowing forests, and knowing that the trees I planted could potentially be seen by people driving by for decades or even centuries to come. We'll see what comes of it in future! A hui hou!

Local sculpture

Two weeks ago I was invited by my friend Ken (whom I've gone on excursions with before) to come along with a local photography club to visit the sculpture garden of a local sculptor, Mike Shewmaker. While I only found out during the visit, I've been passing by one of his sculptures in downtown Hilo for years; it's located near the corner of Kilauea Avenue and Keawe Street, by the Subway. I'd never actually paid much attention to it, but when I saw some of Mike's other work and someone reminded me of the one downtown it instantly clicked.

The sculpture downtown; a plaque mentions that the primary meaning of “hilo” is to braid or twist. 

Mike's sculptures tend towards the abstract primarily, with a number playing on this theme of curving, looping structures seemingly frozen in motion. He was there to meet us and talked about the creation process at some length; interestingly, he designs them in miniature, then has them constructed, and hasn't yet found a design his construction team couldn't handle (even when he was deliberately pushing the limits!).

I quite like this one with the single curly tendril.

Another similar to the one downtown, with some others in the background.

Altogether he has quite a few; with his permission I got the aerial shot below with my drone, and I think I count upwards of forty! Plus the one in Hilo, and he mentioned he has another one going up somewhere in Volcano soon. It was a very interesting visit and chat that lasted over two hours, though the clouds and intermittent light rain made me completely forget about sun protection, resulting in a mild sunburn(!).

Overall it was a fun excursion, and interesting to meet the artist behind a sculpture I go by pretty much every week. Happy Easter! A hui hou!

Electric gas-mileage equivalents

A few days ago I came across a video from a group called Out of Spec Studios who do reviews of various electric vehicles, where did a range test on four electric pickup trucks, the Tesla Cybertruck Cyberbeast, Rivian R1T Dual-Motor Large Pack, Chevy Silverado EV 4WT,  and Ford F-150 Lightning Extended Range. It's a fairly entertaining watch with the editing and personalities involved; they charged each truck up to 100%, then drove them around (simultaneously) on the freeways at 70 miles per hour around Colorado/Wyoming/Nebraska until they ran out of charge to test their range in real-world conditions. (Along with a trailer-mounted diesel generator-powered fast charger for rescuing each one when they ran out of charge!) But what caught my attention was the efficiencies they calculated at the end of the test (and shared up-front in the video, which is pretty awesome).

The efficiencies came out in miles per kilowatt hour (mi/kWh), which I found interesting as I didn't know how to compare it to what I'm more familiar with, miles per gallon (mpg). It turns out there's a value for this, called miles per gallon gasoline equivalent, or MPGe. It's also a very simple conversion: one (U.S.) gallon of gasoline is considered to have 33.7 kWh of energy (though this is only for a theoretical 100% efficient conversion of the chemical potential energy to heat and work; in reality it's always lower). 

The four vehicles tested got 2.0 to 2.6 mi/kWh, which (multiplying by 33.7 hWh/gallon) translates to 67.4 to 87.6 MPGe. My 2018 Nissan Rogue has what I'd consider pretty good gas mileage (despite the hilly terrain of Hilo doing it no favors), and it's only rated at 25 mpg in city driving, or 32 mpg on the highway. (Though it informs me that the last few drives have been closer to 20 mpg, in practice.) That's quite a difference in energy efficiency!

For a different perspective, I looked at comparative costs. By inverting the mileage values and multiplying by the costs of electricity and gasoline, the four electric trucks would theoretically have costs in dollars per mile of $0.19/mile to $0.25/mile (based on the average price of $0.50/kWh for residential electricity). My Rogue, arbitrarily using the cost of gas of $4.88/gallon I saw a few days ago where I usually fill up, would vary from $0.15/mile to $0.18/mile for its highway and city ratings, respectively, so pretty comparable, overall.

I don't have a point to make from all this, I just got curious enough I thought it'd be fun to do some math. Personally, I'd love to have an EV; the allure of being able to charge at home and basically never having to stop at a gas station again is very strong. I didn't get one in 2021 after moving back to Hawaii for a few reasons, primarily the inventory shortage and lack of options at the time, but also the uncertainty in where I would end up living; and since I live in an apartment complex with no place to charge, my Rogue turned out to be for the best for now. It's in good condition and I hope to be able to get plenty more years of use out of it, but hopefully it can also be the last internal-combustion engine vehicle I own. Who knows what the future holds! A hui hou!

Honoliʻi beach at dawn

It's been a busy few weeks here, with several people from my team at work who are normally remote being in town last week for a series of team meetings, socializing, and planning sessions. It was nice to see people in person (and we got a tour of the telescope!), but possibly as a result of all that close contact I came down with a cold on Sunday (which I'm finally mostly over today, thankfully).

However, the week before all that, I drove a short way up the coast around sunrise to Honoliʻi beach, one of the few beaches on this side of the island considered to have any waves worth surfing. It's at the mouth of the Honoliʻi stream, and is one of the relatively rare places along the Hāmākua coast where its usual sea cliffs give way to a beach and have a slope shallow enough to permit walking to the shore. (Honoliʻi means “little valley” in Hawaiian, if you were wondering, which is both descriptive and rather cute.)

Honoliʻi beach and the mouth of the stream.

The morning was bright and clear, and I saw something my housemate Jonathan and I chased several times in vain over a decade ago: a horizon free of clouds for the sunrise! I had begun to think it didn't happen. But the sunlight was dazzling reflecting off the water, which led me to an interesting discovery.

You see, I've got some circularly-polarized lens covers on my drones, one benefit of which is that they block glare from linearly-polarized light reflecting off flat surfaces like water. It partially depends on the angle of the Sun, and while I was conceptually aware of what they did, this flight was the first time I really noticed. With the ocean as smooth as it was, you can see the ocean floor in the image above for quite a ways out from shore. And the water definitely wasn't this transparent to the naked eye by any means, so I was really a bit shocked at how well I could see through it with the filter. Here's another shot from a slightly different angle looking back along the coast towards Hilo; notice how clearly the rocks on the ocean floor are visible near the bottom of the image:

The beach from a different angle.

It was really quite eye-opening, no pun intended. I've always found water too deep to see the bottom of unnerving (one reason I don't spend much time in the ocean), and tend to assume the land drops off quickly. Whereas, from what I could see during this flight, it's actually fairly shallow even a ways from the shore, and slopes down gently. (Which isn't too surprising, given it's a shield volcano with very gentle slope, but our minds fill in assumptions for what we cannot see.)

One last bonus photo, if you follow Honoliʻi stream back from the ocean you come to a nice plunge pool and Makaila falls, surmounted by a bridge carrying the original road up the coast (the current highway uses the bridge seen in the first photo). The name of the falls means “young shoot, as for transplanting,” apparently. It's a lovely, serene place that isn't easily reachable by land. Which I'm beginning to realize is true of many of the waterfalls on the Hāmākua coast, the more I explore with my drone. For every Akaka falls and Rainbow falls, there's another set of falls that can't be easily reached or seen, perhaps not quite as spectacular or breathtaking, but beautiful in its own way. I've started planning out trips based on where I can see falls on Google Maps, trying to find new spectacles to enjoy and share. So you can expect more waterfall photos from me in the future.

Makailo falls.

Having flown up the stream with the Sun at my back lighting the way, I had a bit of a nasty surprise when I tried to turn around and return: the Sun was still so low in the sky that it was shining almost directly down the valley, and the backlighting of leaves and lens flare made it a dicey proposition to try to fly back out. Fortunately, this was actually my second time flying around Makailo falls (the first was back in July of ʻ22 when I stopped near the bridge in the photo), and I knew the pool itself had a clear view of the sky. Combined with the Mini 3 Pro's ability to look upwards better than a lot of drones, I was able to fly straight up out of the jungle and safely back above the trees. All's well that ends well, as they say! A hui hou! And happy leap year!

High surf days in Hilo

In February of last year, I don't think I saw the Sun for the entire month. This year has had nicer weather in comparison, but where last winter saw us receiving torrential rain, this year's theme has been “high winds.” I'm not sure of the exact number, but we've lost probably in the range of a week or two of observing nights due to winds exceeding 50 mph on the summit over the course of January and February to date. While the winds don't get that high in Hilo (outside of hurricanes), they've definitely been noticeably stronger on numerous days this past month.

One effect of that has been a lot of high surf warnings, and that led me on the 2nd to fly my drone out to the Hilo bay breakwater to capture the waves rolling over it majestically one late afternoon. Serendipitously, a hole in the clouds opened to the west, letting the Sun shine in a bit and cast an unusual illumination over the scene. But enough talk, here's the video!

Normally the bay is much more placid (and ‘pacific’), so it's both a shock and a treat to see the waves crashing over the breakwater like that. There's just something about that motion, and the rippling of the sea's surface in general, that I find mesmerizing. Anyway, hope you enjoy the video! A hui hou!

Air and Space goodies

As part of my trip to Arizona, I visited the Pima Air and Space Museum twice, once as part of the ADASS conference dinner and once with my family. I'd never visited before, so it was pretty neat to see all the various things on display. I took too many photos to share them all, but wanted to share a few highlights:

A reproduction of the original Wright flyer, from the first December 17, 1903 flight.

The Bumblebee, officially the smallest plane ever flown. I'm not sure I'd fit inside, honestly.

SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy, a flying observatory.

As part of the ADASS dinner we got an exclusive tour of SOFIA, which was retired in 2022 after twelve years of operation. (Fun fact: Bill Vacca, SOFIA's head of operations for around twenty years, moved from there to become my current boss at Gemini.) This photo is from my second visit, however, as by the time my group got to visit the interior it was dark outside.

SOFIA interior.

I couldn't get the best photos inside due to the dim lighting, but here you can see the modified interior with the seats for the mission directors. The blue thing in the background is the interior side of the telescope mount, which observed through a hatch cut in the side of the airplane. I believe the intention is to eventually open it to the public, and with ADASS we were basically given a sneak peak.

There were so many more planes that I saw, and even more that I only barely got to see; the number they have on the grounds outside the hangers is truly incredible. If you visit Tucson, the Air and Space Museum is definitely worth a visit – though it's probably worth bringing sun protection if you want to spend time looking at all the planes outside. There really are a lot of them. A hui hou!