Personal Panoramic History, Part 9: 2016

I originally wrote this post to go up at the end of December, and had it all ready to go, then forgot to actually post it. Then January flew by in a whirl with my family around, and I've finally got enough time to see about properly posting it.

In the previous post in this series, 2015 was a pretty slow year for me regarding panoramas, having only made a total of six and concentrating them into two months of the year. 2016 was a more varied year, where I still only made seven panoramas but spread them out more evenly to about one a month.

February

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Mauna Kea summit, from the entrance of the JCMT.

February's panorama is a common theme, the summit of Mauna Kea. This is taken from just outside the entrance of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, looking from north to east. You can see all the telescopes on the mountain at the time except for the Submillimetre Array (off to the left), the JCMT (behind me), and the Very Long Baseline Array radio dish further down the mountain.

March

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West end of Puʻu Huluhulu.

I'm pretty sure this is a panorama, based on the file size and perspective effects. (It's definitely not one I assembled out of multiple photos, so I'm thinking it's from my phone camera.) I posted almost this exact picture, except cropped, in a post from 2016. This is the west end of Puʻu Huluhulu, a small eruptive cinder cone near the start of the Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa access roads. I took this picture because I was interested in seeing how the overlying volcanic “crust” had been thrust up by the explosion that created the puʻu, which I talk about more in the linked post.

May

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I never uploaded this panorama before because it didn't turn out all that great—the Sun's flaring on the left and it's pretty dark in places otherwise. It's from a park pretty close to my house in Hilo, where what I think is a little offshoot of the Wailuku river flows serenely by. Some of the foliage, especially in the center foreground, is captured pretty nicely at least, even if the overall contrast range didn't work out too well.

June

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Experimenting with getting a good contrast range was the theme for June, as I took three panoramas with my phone camera, all from atop Puʻu Kalepeamoa looking up towards Mauna Kea at sunset:

The first one came out way too dark, as the camera focused on exposing the white clouds and blue sky.

The second one came out better. The clouds are blown out now, but you can still see a bit of blue in the sky while simultaneously being able to make out details in the shadowed areas.

The third one swung a bit too far into overblown territory, though at least the detail in the shadowed areas can be seen quite clearly now!

While writing this post I had an idea to see if I could somehow merge the three together to get an image with high dynamic range, but unfortunately the perspective shifts enough between them that it's impossible to get them to line up correctly.

July

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In July I took a trip to a night market down in Puna the name of which I've unfortunately forgotten (“Uncle Roberts,” maybe?). It was located down by the beach, which allowed to get this…very strange looking panorama at sunset. No, that's not some distant tsunami causing the water on the horizon to bulge up like that, it's just what my phone camera made of it. Wish I'd been able to get a better panorama, as it was a nice rocky beach and a beautiful time of day, with the water all foamy on the strand.

September

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In September I took another trip to Volcanoes National Park and hiked the Kīlauea Iki trail for the third time. As per tradition, I took a few panoramas while I was there:

The first is from my phone camera, and illustrates a problem I've often had trying to get pictures within the Kīlauea Iki crater. Namely, the lava rock is so dark black that it's really difficult to expose both it and the sky at once. I'm sure it's possible, but my phone camera wasn't able to pull it off. I never posted this panorama as I wasn't happy about it for that reason, but looking at it now I find I rather like it. Sure the sky's blown out, but the rest of it's actually a pretty good representation of Kīlauea Iki from the eastern end.

The other panorama is one of the more rare vertical ones, and this one is hand-created from a few photos I took with my DSLR. (I've found Hugin doesn't necessarily handle these vertical ones that well.) This area is at the foot of the mountain of cinder and rock on the south-western edge of the crater, where the lava erupted from. I'm not sure why it's so much greener than the rest of the crater floor; perhaps water channels or pools here better? Or since it's more cinder and less unbroken rock, it's easier for plants to get a roothold? Whatever the reason, it's a little oasis of green in the black rocky desert.

And that's it for 2016 panoramas! In 2017 I get my second job working at over a mile high, so there will be some really nice panoramas, though it'll still be about the same number overall. A hui hou!

Painting a Volcano Is Like Making a Volcano: Layers Upon Layers

Last month I teased a project I've been working on for a while, and having finished it this week I'm finally ready to reveal it:

I've taken up painting (with acrylics)! And I've finished my first painting!

I mused about taking up painting in this post back in June, having found the experience of painting my YTLA model at the beginning of the year to be very soothing and enjoyable. Back in August we restarted our weekly art workshops at Swinburne with our artists-in-residence Pam and Carolyn, and I decided to go for it—and I'm ultimately really glad I did, as I've found it to be incredibly rewarding.

For my first painting, I wanted to paint a picture that I've had in my head since at least 2012, back when I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. It was inspired by my reading about how Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa used to host year-round glacial ice caps, and also erupted underneath those glaciers. A picture came into my mind of the summit of Mauna Kea, snow-clad, looking south towards Mauna Loa similarly covered in ice, at night with the (northern hemisphere) summer Milky Way rising majestically above while a fountain of lava erupts from Mauna Kea's summit through a crack in the ice.

I'd originally wanted to do this using Blender, like some previous projects of mine, but I just never got around to it after I started working full time so I decided I'd try doing it as my first painting project. Probably far too ambitious for a beginner like me, but you can judge how it turned out for yourself. Since I enjoy seeing the creative process I took a bunch of photos throughout the entire three-month creation period, so you can watch the entire process as it unfolded.

Here it is, my first swatch of paint applied to canvas, August 21, 2018. (Though I also spent two weeks before this applying two coats of gesso—essentially a primer layer of white paint mixed with chalk which serves as a good base for future paint layers.) Not much to look at yet, but you can see the outline of Mauna Loa and Hualālai (on the right) starting to take shape already. There's a curious thrill of trepidation that comes when holding a loaded paintbrush poised over a blank canvas; the feeling of permanence and lack of an undo option combine to make it a bit nerve-wracking even when doing nothing more complicated than a flat black night sky!

Next, I added the glacier atop Mauna Loa. The glaciers were probably the most difficult part of this project for me, as I've never seen one personally so I had to rely on photos and my own ideas of how ice looks. I think this one atop Mauna Loa came out pretty well, at least.

Of course, even personal familiarity with a subject doesn't guarantee I'll paint it well. I painted a lot of the early stages from my mental picture without reference photos, and I definitely could've done a better job with the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai with some visual references. Still, this session was interesting for mixing a few different colors to play with. I'm not using pretty much any colors straight from the tube (other than the black background, and maybe some of that gray), rather I'm mixing them to start to get a grip on color mixing theory as it applies to acrylic paint.

Moving into September I finished off the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai. I mixed even more shades of colors this time and started layering them over older ones, which led me to the striking realization that making a volcano and painting a volcano are very similar processes; just layers upon layers!

Almost immediately upon actually putting paint to canvas at the beginning I realized I was enjoying the process far too much to wait for weekly workshop sessions, so I quickly started working on my own throughout the week. I had a short time available for this session so I added a cloud on the left approaching from the east and crossing the Saddle. (Spoilers: I wasn't happy with it almost immediately upon finishing it, so it'll change later.)

Next session, I tackled the snow-covered summit of Mauna Kea in the foreground. A sharp-eyed inspection of this photo will reveal that it's upside-down, as I rotated the canvas on the easel so that I could paint along the bottom edge of it. It turned out to be an interesting artistic exercise, actually; I painted the smaller cinder cone on the left entirely upside-down, and am still happy with how it came out. I wasn't very happy with the glacier as a whole though, so you'll see it getting reworked.

Case in point: here I've gone over most of the foreground to try to both merge it more naturally from side to side and also introduce some feeling of contours to help define the shape. The cinder cones got some working over, too. They're actually based on real cinder cones still extant at the summit, though I didn't copy them particularly closely. The large one on the left is Puʻu Wēkiu, the eastern rim of which is today the highest point on Mauna Kea; the one behind it is Puʻu Haukea, a relatively recent cinder cone going by its not-yet-significantly-weathered dark gray color; and the one on the right is Puʻu Poliʻahu, named after one of the Hawaiian goddesses of snow. It's very close to the present-day location of the JCMT, and has a much more weathered and irregular profile now than I've painted it here.

At this point I finally started looking up references for what Mauna Kea looked like when snow-covered nowadays, and realized that photos usually showed black rocks sticking out from the snow, especially around rims and ridges. I went a little overboard with it here (and dialed it back later), but I think it definitely helps to define parts of the space better.

I was never entirely happy with the cloud I'd added, nor the center part of the foreground glacier, so in one session I redid both of them. I think it was around now that I started realizing that the composition didn't really have space for a lava fountain like I'd originally intended, but I was still on the fence about including one eventually at this point.

Instead, I decided to expand! Pam encouraged me to add a second canvas to the sky to better capture the Milky Way, and I'm really glad I took her advice. Actually painting the Milky Way was an interesting and exhausting process, as I did it by spattering paint on the canvas to make stars. (I blocked off the foreground beforehand so it wouldn't be affected.) In what's turning out to be a recurring theme, I wasn't happy with the initial look of it and spent a few sessions reworking it…

Coming into October, I went back and spattered more stars on the canvas, though I made the same mistake as before and tried to paint in the Milky Way's dust lanes from my head rather than from a reference. You might have noticed that the quality of these photos, especially regarding glare, changes a lot; it depended on if I took them in the evening after working on them under electric light, or in the morning the next day when there was daylight. Large expanses of black like the night sky here were especially difficult to properly represent the darkness of.

It's not easy to see in the photo, but I've gone and hand-painted in all the brightest stars that one could reasonably see with the naked eye based on the perspective and time of year. The center of the Milky Way roughly coincides with the center of the top canvas, so Sagittarius, Scorpius, and Corona Australis are all visible, with a bit of Lupus on the right and a few other constellations having one or two stars appearing. And being the stickler that I am, I actually painted them with colors corresponding to their spectral types. This session turned out to be surprisingly grueling, trying to put the stars in the right places based on a star map using Stellarium. I also added a few nebulae as well; the largest pink patch near the center is the Lagoon Nebula, while just above it is the Trifid Nebula. You can also see that I've subtly whited out bits of the black rims of the cinder cones to make them blend in a bit more.

I was worried that the hand-painted stars wouldn't stand out all the much from the background splatter stars, until a few days later when I noticed an interesting thing: up close to the canvas you can see all the faint background stars, but step back a few paces and it all disappears into the blackness of the night, leaving the hand-painted stars as the only ones to be seen! I definitely didn't plan that, but it works really well, and is an interesting lesson in how a painting can be seen differently at different distances; a dynamic I hadn't really appreciated from my previous experience doing artwork on a computer where you generally only look at something from a fairly fixed, nearby distance.

Finally, in one mammoth two-and-a-half-hour session I went over the Milky Way again by hand, adding gossamer stars clouds and actual dust lanes from reference photos. I spent so long looking at the Milky Way, in fact, that I now immediately recognize structures in the dust lanes in other photos from having painted them. There are still some factually incorrect dust lanes in there, but it's much more realistic now. And at this point I realized that I was satisfied with it. I could keep tinkering with it and adding more details, but I was also fine with calling it finished (I also finally decided against adding any eruption activity). I did one last session on Pam's suggestion to add a bit more color to reflect the color of the Milky Way in the ice and to push Mauna Loa more into the background, and the result is:

My first painting is complete! I varnished it just this week. The lighting on this photo is, once again, pretty terrible, but it gives a decent idea of what it's like. Together the two canvases are 80×80 centimeters (31×31 inches), so it's reasonably large. I call it “Mauna Kea a me Mauna Loa ma lalo o ka lani hōkū (Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa beneath the starry heavens).”

It feels amazing to have finally finished it, and I've received lots of nice comments on it from people. I've really dived into painting, as I've found it to be way more fun and engaging than I had expected. I've picked up a number of tubes of paint and brushes, and even a palette knife which looks like a tiny trowel and reminds me of doing archaeology! I've been reading up on techniques and painting terms, and checking out the paintings of famous painters with a new eye. (I'm thankful for a decent amount of art history in my education, but I'm learning there are so many painters I've never even heard of!)

Now that I've finally cleared that picture from my head I find another one has arisen to take its place. People have also given me some ideas for others (like a series of planetary landscapes around the solar system), so we'll see what comes next. But one thing's for sure: I expect this to be a hobby for years to come. A hui hou!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 7: 2014

I thought 2013 (covered previously here) was a slow year for panoramas, but I think 2014 has it beat. The first photos I found that could be put together were all the way in…

September

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In September a friend and I hiked into Pololū Valley, and along the way we stopped at the overlook for Waipiʻo Valley. These two valleys are the ends of a chain of huge valleys that cut into the northeastern face of the remains of the Kohala volcano, the oldest and northernmost of the five sub-aerial (i.e., above sea level) volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaiʻi. There are some seven major valleys and dozens of small ones, and the whole area is among the least accessible on the island. There's a car-traversable road into Waipiʻo Valley, but accessing the other valleys requires either hiking up and back down several-hundred-feet cliff walls multiple times, or a canoe.

Here's the Waipiʻo Valley overlook. In Ancient Hawaiʻi these valleys were significant population centers, but this is the only one people still inhabit today.

After stopping there we drove around to the north end of the island and came down the coast to Pololū Valley, where this panorama was taken. This is the view from the parking lot at the overlook at the start of the footpath down into the valley. This is definitely one of my favorite panoramas I've taken, I think; it just came out really nicely. It was just three photos, taken almost on the spur of the moment.

This panorama comes from about halfway down the footpath into the valley. You can see the same headland and rocks in the water that are visible in the picture above. You can also see that the clouds to the west were starting to come in and cover the brilliant blue sky to east. Luckily we didn't get rained up, but it got a lot grayer after this!

November

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In November I took my second trip to see Lake Waiau near the summit of Mauna Kea, and took the opportunity to take some more panoramas.

Here's one from slightly up the edge of the crater that the lake sits in. I didn't notice the two hikers at the far right on the crater rim until after I'd assembled the panorama, but they give you a (very poor) sense of scale.

And here's a panorama from by the shore. The lake was a lot more full this time than it was when I visited it the first time back in 2011. I don't think it gets much more full than this, however, as I believe it starts to spill out the west side of the crater directly opposite from where these photos were taken if the lake level gets any higher.

And that's it for 2014, a rather slow year in the photo-taking department. Well, at least when it comes to turning photos into panoramas. 2015 will be a bit short as well, but it does have a few nice ones that I hadn't put together before finding Hugin and thus haven't shown before, including some more from Oregon. A hui hou!

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!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 5: 2012

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

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

April

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

Mauna Kea from the south.

Hualālai and Mauna Kea

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

Mauna Loa summit caldera.

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

June

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Venus transiting before the Sun.

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

August

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

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

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

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

Personal Panoramic History, Part 4: 2011

In the previous post in this series we looked at a whole bunch of panoramas of Mauna Loa. In 2011, in contrast…okay, I can't lie, we'll see a few more panoramas of Mauna Loa. If ever there were mountains made for panoramic viewing, it's Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. But! We'll also see some new and unique vistas which for various reasons I haven't had the chance to recreate.

2011 was the year I finished college and graduated from UH Hilo, and thanks to all the volunteering I'd done at the Visitor Information Station I had a job lined up to start there in 2012. But for now, let's get on to the pictures…

January

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In January 2011 my housemate Jonathan and I decided it'd be cool to try to get some photos of the Sun rising out of the ocean from Hilo. It took us several trips to various locations around Hilo at the crack of dawn over the course of a few weeks to realize that the joke was on us: there are always clouds away off on the eastern horizon around Hawaiʻi. So we never did get the pictures of the Sun rising majestically out of the ocean like we wanted, but at least I got this first light panorama of Hilo Bay out of it (unintentionally, I only found and put these photos together while writing this post):

Mauna Kea over Hilo Bay. Coconut Island on the right.

This panorama from the morning of January 17th shows Mauna Kea, resplendent in the pre-dawn chill, with Hilo stretched out along the left side of the image and Coconut Island on the right. You can probably only see it if you already know what you're looking for, but you can see the breakwater that protects the bay stretching along the horizon behind Coconut Island on the right side of the picture. It looks like it may have been raining north of Hilo and further up the slopes of Mauna Kea that day.

February

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On February 22nd I hiked the summit trail of Mauna Kea (down) for the first (and so far only) time as part of a volunteer effort to pick up trash and keep the trail clean. (As before, you can follow that link and mouseover the panoramas in the post to see the original hand-made versions.) This allowed me to get a panorama of a rather different body of water:

Lake Waiau.

This is Lake Waiau, at an elevation of 13,020 feet (3970 m) making it one of the higher lakes in the world (though it depends strongly upon which list of lofty lakes you consult, as there's no official definition of what a lake is). I did originally have a picture of the right hand side of the lake (its north end, from this perspective), but somehow lost it in the process of transferring the photos from my camera to my computer all the way back when I made my first, manual version of this panorama. I have another panorama of this lake, but that's for a future post!

Mauna Loa, from part-way down the south slope of Mauna Kea.

And here's our first Mauna Loa panorama for the year, from somewhere down the trail. The summit area of Mauna Kea is so broad and flat that it can be hard to remember you're on top of a mountain sometimes, but as you descend you reach some (moderately) steeper bits that allow you look down and see the Saddle region spreading before you, with Mauna Loa in the distance. If you look closely you can even just make out Hualālai peeking over the hills on the right. This is definitely another one of my favorite panoramas I've taken.

June

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On the 12th of June I had the opportunity to hike to the actual summit of Mauna Kea, something I've only done three or four times over the years despite being in the general area more frequently. (It's not a long walk, it's perhaps ten minutes or so from the closest road, I just never usually had time when I was up there due to other duties.) Whenever I had the chance to do so, however, I'd always discover that I had either forgotten my camera, its batteries were dead, or the weather was so bad that I couldn't get pictures (it wouldn't be until January of 2012 that I got my first smart phone, and I had no way of getting photos off the phone I had before that).

Except this time. For once I'd remembered my camera, it still had battery power, and the weather, though not great, was good enough to get this panorama:

Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea summit.

This may be the only picture on this blog from Mauna Kea's summit, at the rarefied height of 13,796 feet (4,205 meters). This view stretches from looking east on the left down towards Mauna Loa to the south. As you can see the weather was not particularly great that day, with lots of cloud cover both around the slopes of the volcanoes and also much higher up. The cinder cone bowl seen in the foreground on the right of the image is Puʻu Wēkiu, wēkiu meaning “summit” in Hawaiian. The summit proper is simply the highest point in its rim.

I really wish I'd done a 360° panorama for this one. Oh well, future life goals I guess. Someday when the weather's better would make a better picture anyway.

July

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Come July I was once again back home in California visiting family, and my mom's family had a reunion up in Washington so we drove up through Oregon to attend. Along the way we stopped at some pretty nifty places, and I was able to get a few panoramas out of it (only one of which has shown up on this blog before).

One of the places we stopped was Crater Lake inside Mount Mazama, which is a fabulously cool place to visit. Despite visiting in July there was still plenty of snow piled high in places.

Crater Lake, with Phantom Ship visible.

This simple four-photo panorama comes from somewhere on the south-eastern side on the rim of the massive caldera that makes up the lake. Visible near the bottom-center is Phantom Ship, the smaller of the two islands in the lake. This and the next panorama were only created while writing this post, so they're new to me as well!

Crater Lake, this time with the much larger Wizard Island visible.

This panorama comes from the walkway heading towards the Visitor Center which provides an overlook of and lots of information about Crater Lake itself. In this shot the much larger Wizard Island near the western side of the lake is visible. The lake is 1,949 feet (594 meters) deep at its deepest point, yet Wizard Island still towers an additional 755 feet (230 meters) above its surface! It's a cinder cone formed in the caldera after the monumental eruption that dropped Mount Mazama's height by nearly a kilometer and created the original caldera.

Crater Lake with Wizard Island again, from the Visitor Center.

Finally, this panorama is one I've shown before, though this version was created with Hugin rather than by hand (you can compare the two by mousing over the image in the linked post). I really didn't write that much about Crater Lake when I visited it, which is a shame because it's a fascinating place. Especially after living in Hawaii for a few years and becoming acquainted with volcanoes.

For instance, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the US, the ninth deepest in the world, and has some of the clearest water of any natural bodies of water anywhere. And the scale is simply mind-blowing: Mount Mazama was estimated to be about 12,000 feet (3,200 meters) high before its fateful eruption; the highest point on the rim is now 8,159 feet (2,487 meters). A beautiful and poignant reminder of the raw energy of the natural world.

Another place we stopped after visiting the lake was the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Painted Hills Unit. (Hooray for taking pictures of signs so I know where it was!) These two panoramas were both two-photo accidental panoramas that I only discovered while writing this post.

Painted Hills, Oregon.

The landscape was truly spectacular. I wish I'd created more panoramas while I was there, as there was no shortage of subjects.

Oregonian bluff.

I'm not sure what this bluff is called (if anything), or where it is exactly—all I can tell is that we took a few group photos in front of it after I got this panorama and it appears to be near where we ate a picnic lunch. It's a great representative of the landscape in the area, though!

September

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September found me back in Hawaii, taking pictures of the same familiar subjects once again: more Mauna Loa panoramas! Seriously, I'll have to count how many different ones this single volcano's featured in when I finish this series…

Mauna Loa.

This panorama and the next are reminiscent of a similar one from 2009 seen in part 2 (though here the grass is brown and dry). Possibly an attempt to recreate it, as the 2009 version is one of my favorite panoramas I've taken. Don't look too closely at those fence wires, they kinda pop in and out of existence near the bottom of the image. I imagine close-in fine details like that are difficult for Hugin to deal with when there isn't enough photo coverage and the perspective changes rapidly.

Mauna Loa, again.

This panorama (from a zoomed-in perspective) is the Hugin version of a panorama I originally created manually whose existence led me to discover this forgotten post where I'd already shown off the manual version but forgotten to apply any tags. Don't look too closely at the barbed wire in this one either.

Mauna Loa, from just outside the Keck building.

This two-photo mini-panorama comes from outside the Keck building, though it doesn't show much other than Mauna Loa in the background and some of the so-called Sub-millimeter Valley where the telescopes sensitive to light with sub-millimeter wavelengths reside. You can see CSO in the middle, and some of JCMT on the right. Pretty sure this wasn't planned to be a panorama originally or I'd have taken photos with a wider coverage.

November

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On November 4th the University Astrophysics Club was able to get a tour of Gemini North, the InfraRed Telescope Facility, and UH Hilo's own Hōkū Keʻa telescope. This trip is the snowiest it's been up at the summit while I've been up there, which makes for some great images! The first two here I only created in the process of writing this post.

Snowy Mauna Kea summit, overlooking Submillimeter valley.

Another shot from outside Keck. (I'm not actually sure why, as I don't think a Keck tour was part of our itinerary—I don't have photos from inside it, anyway.) The snowfall must've been recent, but fairly light. (And judging by the distribution, must have come from the west, maybe? This is facing south towards Mauna Loa.)

Mauna Kea's snowy North Plateau.

This one's kinda interesting. It looks like it came from near IRTF, and is facing north over the North Plateau (where TMT, if it ever gets built, is slated to go). I don't usually take too many photos facing north like that, especially if the weather isn't clear and Maui isn't visible.

From a few weeks later (November 27th, to be precise) comes this panorama of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Though it may not look it, this one is actually from a (slightly) different location to the others that have shown up so far. On the left of the image, between the peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, you can see the peak of Puʻu Kelepeamoa, where several of these panoramas have been from. That peak, however, is merely the highest point in the rim of a giant cinder cone just below the Visitor Information Station (so large, in fact, that the Access Road runs through it). This panorama was taken from the second-highest point in the rim, on its eastern side. (Puʻu Kalepeamoa is on the west.)

In the original hand-made version of this panorama (visible at the link above) I put Mauna Loa on the right of Mauna Kea (possible as it's one of my rare full 360° panoramas), but I think this composition works a lot better.

December

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In December of 2011 I graduated from UH Hilo (or technically, I participated in the ceremony, a slight miscalculation with paperwork meant that I didn't officially graduate until next semester). Also my family came out to visit for the first time! We did some sightseeing while everyone was there, and I have a lot of photos, but I could only find a single accidental panorama, from a botanical garden we visited a ways up the coast north of Hilo:

Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, looking out onto Onomea Bay. Don't look too closely at the middle palm tree.

And that's it for 2011! A pretty good year for panoramas, all told. The next post's going to be pretty short as I really didn't take too many panoramas in 2012, not even accidental ones to be discovered after the fact. There're a few good ones, though, and starting in 2012 there'll be ones taken with a phone camera—they're pretty awful at first, so it'll be interesting to watch them improve over the years. A hui hou!