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!

Brumal Melbourne weather

Well it is most definitely winter here in the southern hemisphere, as Melbourne had its first severe storm of the year come through this past week. And what a storm it was! An estimated 290,000 homes (including mine) lost power from 100 kph (60 mph) winds and the local Ringwood–Lilydale train line still isn't running due to “tree damage to infrastructure.” The power went out for me Wednesday night about 9:40 PM and was out for almost exactly 24 hours, but there are apparently people in Victoria projected not to get power back until Sunday (still in the future as I write this Saturday evening). I spent a highly unpleasant Thursday sans heat, the thermometer in my room hovering between 14 and 15 °C [57.2 to 59 °F], but the temperature outside dropped Thursday night down to 6 °C (42.8 °F) overnight, so I really feel for any poor people still without power. In a twist of irony, we do have a natural gas heater at my place…which requires electricity to light, so no heat for us on Thursday. Our internet's still out as I write for whatever reason. (Luckily I can use my phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot, or you wouldn't be getting this post!)

I can't wait to someday own a home with a battery back-up and solar panels and laugh in the face of power outages, but today is not yet that day. Though even cold and miserable as I was on Thursday, I still made use of the lack of electricity to run an experiment I never would have otherwise to see how much a hot shower would warm up the bathroom in the absence of any other heat. The answer, unfortunately for me, turned out to be an unnoticeable 0.5 °C (0.9 °F), up to 14.5 °C (58.1 °F). (Though I guess should be grateful our water heater must use a continuous gas pilot light or something—I didn't really think about it until after the shower and realized it might very easily have been electric!) Still, power's back now, I am once again warm, and I hope to have some paintings to show off before too much longer, including my banana slug which is definitely nearing completion. That's all for now, though. A hui hou!

Farewell to 2020

With less than four hours to go to 2021 as I type this, I wanted to cap off a turbulent year with one final post.

Where to begin? I have so much to be thankful for over the past 366 days. Just under a year ago, in early January, I flew through Shanghai airport on my way back from visiting family in California, just a few days after hearing about a new disease called “COVID-19” which was showing up in China. Thankfully I avoided catching it, either then or since. And while multiple members of my family caught it back in the U.S., they all survived more-or-less unscathed, a fortune not shared by millions of grieving people around the globe this year.

My PhD research has also thankfully been mostly unscathed by the tumult of transitioning to working from home from early March. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more upset-resistant project than mine: my data is all archival (so I don't have to worry about observing runs being disrupted), I already had it all downloaded on a hard drive I can bring with me, and all my research happens on my university-provided laptop (so no worrying about the Swinburne supercomputer being down or having a faulty internet connection like many of my fellow students). I've continued to make slow but steady progress over the past ~9 months, and haven't had unavoidable delays like students in other fields who were doing lab work have. While the transition to working from home initially produced psychological stresses not unlike a house move (which was interesting to observe), once those wore off after a few weeks I've been quite happy not to be taking lengthy public transportation every day, and am probably going to continue working from home for the remainder of my PhD. (Which should hopefully be finished before the end of March.)

Sure, what I'm calling The Great Melbourne Lockdown was a bit rough. But I made it through with a guaranteed student stipend, the newly-discovered ability to order groceries online from my local grocery store, and the natural propensity of an introvert (or maybe just a hermit) to be at home when given the option. The winter was miserably cold, since keeping my room warm all the time in Melbourne's "What's insulation?" housing would've been prohibitively expensive with a space heater, but when, outside of the tropics, aren't winters miserable? (I'm channeling it towards motivation to find a job in the tropics again.) And on the plus side I didn't have to tramp a kilometer to and from the train station every day no matter the weather—on near-freezing rainy days I could time my daily walk with a break in the clouds, or even skip it altogether.

So on the whole, I really do have many things to be grateful for this past year. But what's on the horizon for 2021? 

Well, as mentioned, I hope to be finishing up my PhD and submitting my thesis by the end of March. Along the way I plan to submit two papers, containing the results of my three and a half years' of work. (I'm also contemplating a series of posts covering my research aimed at a layman audience now that the results are nearly done.) This is the time of year for astronomy jobs to be posted, so I'll be kicking the job hunt into high gear next week. It's no secret that I miss Hawaii and will be checking for jobs there, but who knows where things will go from here? I'll be looking for astronomy jobs first, but the skills I've learned from my PhD are quite broadly applicable; this year's put a lot of things into perspective for me, and I wouldn't mind potentially putting my skills to work in a medical field for a few years.

In the meantime, the prospect of summer is looming in the near future…probably. While we had some extremely hot days in late November presaging the approaching estival season, the weather here in Melbourne took a dip back to cooler temperatures for most of December. I've been wearing warm clothes and occasionally running the heater the past two weeks (including on Christmas) due to the antarctic cold fronts blowing up from the south lately. Now, as much as I dislike being cold, I can at least mitigate it with clothing and heating; cooling down from Melbourne's intensely hot summers (with nights that sometimes barely cool down) is a bit trickier, as the AC unit we got installed last year is out in the living room and doesn't really reach back to my bedroom. Supposedly we're in for a cooler and wetter summer due to a La Niña year in the Pacific, and I will happily take that over the more typical Melbournian summers I've endured the past few years. (I've also got a new gadget that might help out a bit with that, but I'll save a full discussion and review for a post early next year…)

As we approach anno Domini 2021, I'm feeling fairly upbeat. Yes, there are the multiple promising vaccines that will hopefully bring an end to the worst pandemic in a century; but I'm also really looking forward to finishing this PhD into which I've poured a tenth of my life and moving on to something different. Exactly what, I don't know yet, but that's the exciting part. I've been reading two books lately: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, and Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, by Rich Karlgaard. Range is a study about how many of the greatest breakthroughs and innovations throughout history have come from people who, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of specializing ever more deeply in a single subject, were broadly acquainted with many, allowing them to see and make connections their more specialized peers weren't equipped to. And Late Bloomers complements that by documenting many people who, despite society's push for us to be high-achievers by our 20's, bloomed and discovered new talents much later in life.

Range argues that instead of knowing exactly what we want to do for the rest of our lives before college, we are actually very ill-equipped to make that decision and should instead spend time during and after college trying various different jobs and experiences out for short periods of time, both to become more well-rounded and experienced and to have a better chance of discovering what exactly we want to do. Late Bloomers similarly advocates for patience in figuring out our path, due to full brain development demonstrably happening later in people these days (with a median age around 25, but even into late 20s or early 30s), and being open to the possibility of change and discovering new talents and interests throughout life.

Taken together, they've been very comforting to me. I've been secretly bothered for a long time by the way my brain doesn't really fit with the prevailing societal pressure to “pick something early and specialize in it forever.” My interests shift with the years, and I've held several jobs over the past decade rather than a single one. Range taught me to look upon my breadth of experience as an asset rather than a disadvantage, and Late Bloomers taught me not to fear the changes of time, or to worry about not already having changed the world or become a multi-millionaire. I've learned a lot over the course of my PhD; research methods, for sure, but I've also had time to become much more knowledgeable in Python (which will serve me well for any number of possible jobs) and I've discovered latent talents like painting and music scoring I never knew I had. I've learned that maybe research (or at least academia) isn't for me like I thought when I was younger, and I'm eager to try something new when I'm done with my PhD. Between it all, while I don't know what the future holds, I'm feeling more optimistic about it than I have for the past few years. And with that, here's to a Happy New Year 2021! Hau'oli Makahiki Hou!

A Typical Melbournian Hailstorm

So if you've followed this blog for a while you may know that I enjoy making videos, and have been doing so for a few years now. And while cell phones are a great portable video-taking device (seeing as all my previous videos were taken using them), some of the kinds of things I really want to do (such as long timelapse videos) aren't really suited for being taken by them (not that that's stopped me before). I've thus been interested in getting a dedicated action camera such as a GoPro for several years now; in fact, I first looked into it back in 2017 right before coming to Australia, but couldn't afford one at the time.

Fast forward to 2020, and with all the money I'm saving on not taking public transport and eating out during the week I could finally convince myself I could afford one. The latest GoPro model, the HERO9 Black, came out in September with some nice improvements (such as for timelapses), and after doing a lot of research into various action cameras out there I picked one up over a sale on Thanksgiving weekend! (GoPro has actual competition now, but its specific features were still the best fit for what I wanted.)

Tada! This was me attempting timelapses of the night sky. They're impressively easy to get, but not quite ready to show off.

I'm still experimenting with it, but today I've got my first video to show off. Last Thursday we were projected to have an afternoon thunderstorm, so I decided I'd put my camera out facing up and try to get a timelapse of the clouds passing overhead. Fortunately, I somehow started recording real-time video instead (still learning!), and it turned out that the thunderstorm dropped some hail as well (as they often do, in Melbourne, we had another hail storm less than a fortnight before that).

I was worried for my new camera, but more worried about myself dashing out into the hail to retrieve it, which worked out for the best as the camera's fine and I got a cool video of being in a hail storm. The storm itself passed in less than 30 minutes, so I sped the whole thing up 10× and made the following video out of it:

Anyway, that's all for now, but look forward to more—and hopefully more innovative and unique—videos from me in the future, as I figure out what kinds of videos I can get with something I wouldn't want to use my phone for. A hui hou!

A Weird Week (2020 Edition)

I've now made more social visits in the past three days (two) than in the prior seven months (one), now that Melbourne has emerged from its second lockdown. I've gone from shivering two days ago to being mildly too hot today. I also voted by absentee ballot from overseas for the first time! It's been a weird week.

Saturday I went into Swinburne for the first time since mid-March to pick up various things from my desk, including a small fraction of the painting supplies I left there. I'm fairly excited about this, as I have some new (old) projects to work on, and options to work on them with now! (I also saw a friend who lives nearby, hence the social visit.)

If I'd been thinking, I could've printed out my absentee ballot to sign it while I was there (assuming the printer was still powered up and connected), but I didn't, so thankfully some good friends of mine in Mitcham helped me out there. I just emailed the scanned, signed ballot off an hour ago, so that's all taken care of. (Thankfully Hawaii makes it convenient to vote, although at least I was on top of things enough this time around to have requested it back at the end of September so I could've mailed it in on time if need be. Hopefully. You never know with the global postal service this year.)

The weather is finally starting to show signs of warming up, too, with today being comfortable in the morning and even hot in the afternoon—though there's a storm predicted for tomorrow afternoon which will plunge the temperatures back down into “decidedly chilly” for another few days. Still, in my (limited) experience it seems like the weather in Melbourne generally warms up in November, and it seems to be on its way. The days are quite noticeably longer now so when it's clear the Sun really heats things up. That's about all for now, though! A hui hou!

Three Years in Melbourne

I'm a few days late to the exact date, but this week marks three years since I came to Melbourne. The weather is finally starting to show signs of spring, though being Melbourne it continues to oscillate wildly—I had to laugh a few days ago when I saw this prediction on my weather app:

Note the Monday high lower than the Sunday low.

Saturday and Sunday were indeed beautiful; I took a walk in shorts, T-shirt, and even sandals (for the first time in something like half a year) on Sunday and felt perfectly comfortable the entire time. Today, on the other hand, due to a cold front dumping lots of cold rain overnight, it's felt like right back into the depths of winter. I'm not too surprised, at least, as in my experience it takes till at least mid-November and some years even into December to really warm up in a sustained fashion.

Other than that, not much is going on here; we're all hoping for COVID-19 cases to drop enough to be able to ease some of the lockdown restrictions by the 19th, and I'm just recuperating from the last month or so of hard work for my final review. With the Daylight Savings Time change this weekend I've also got an hour's worth of jet-lag, so I should probably finish this up and get a good night's sleep. A hui hou!

Back to (Smokey) Melbourne

Well, I made it back to Melbourne safely last week, though I arrived to a rather different environment then I left: the smell of smoke was thick on the air, and making its presence known by the reduced visibility it was causing. We had a storm last Thursday which cleared it out (and some southerly winds over the weekend which helped keep it out), but by Monday this week it was starting to appear again, and Tuesday morning looked like this:

That's the train station near my house, and as you can see visibility was down to perhaps half a kilometer. Wednesday (yesterday) morning was like that as well, but thankfully a thunderstorm came through Wednesday afternoon and again cleared it out. (The forecast for next week looks pretty rainy, so hopefully it'll keep the smoke away and help with the fire fighting.)

Other than that I also started back up my research this week, and have been going through the process of figuring out what I was doing when I left off. I think I'm getting better at writing readable code, as it hasn't taken me long to get back to tinkering with it—in fact even my first day back I was making some fairly important improvements. I'm becoming keenly aware that I've got less than ten months left in my PhD, and need to get some results out soon. It's definitely getting there, at least, and I think it's now as much a matter of actually hammering out a first paper as continuing to analyze the data we have. But that's work for another day. Outside of work I've also taken up painting again, starting with this hilarious Christmas gift from my mother:

This is a rare case of me letting you see what I'm working on before it's done, so enjoy it while it lasts! No idea when it'll be finished, though I got a good start on it last night. But that's all for now, I think. A hui hou!

A New Profile Picture for the Summer Solstice!

I was recently reminded of the fact that what used to be my profile picture was, as of a week ago, eight years old. It's not a bad photo (which is saying something since I usually hate pictures of myself by default), but I was twenty when it was taken and I've grown and changed a bit since then.

The photo my old profile picture came from, from December 14, 2009. (That's Rainbow Falls in Hilo.)

Yesterday I had another grad student get a picture of me in front of the projector screen in the lunch room, and while it's not a great photo, it gave me the idea of using the background as a makeshift green screen combined with a few of the astrophotos I've taken over the years…

The initial picture…

…with the Lagoon Nebula…

…Omega Centauri…

…the Orion Nebula…

…and the western Veil Nebula as backgrounds.

I'm pretty pleased with how these came out, overall. I tried a number of other astrophotos of mine but they didn't work out for various reasons (the objects were usually too small and compact, or I just couldn't place them somewhere that looked good).

What does this have to do with the summer solstice I mentioned in the title? Ultimately very little, other than the fact that I always plan to write a post to note the passage of equinoxes and solstices and then never remember to actually do it. There's also the curious fact that, despite it being the summer solstice here in Melbourne, the longest day of the year, I still needed long pants and socks this morning and narrowly avoided needing to bring a coat with me due to the weather taking a swift turn for the frigid after the 30+ °C (90+ °F) temperatures we were having just two days ago. I think it's time to throw in the towel and admit that I'm never going to understand Melbournian weather.

I'm Writing for Astrobites!

Back in October, a few days after I'd arrived in Australia and started getting set up at Swinburne, one of the first emails I received at my new university address was a notice sent around to all students that applications for writing for Astrobites were now open. Never having heard of Astrobites, I checked it out and discovered that it's a blog collectively run by a diverse assortment of mostly graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics whose dual purpose is to 1) let grad students gain writing experience, primarily through its most common type of post, a daily summary of a scientific paper written at an undergraduate level (though more general posts on research, astronomy in general, and the graduate student experience are common), and 2) serve as a resource for undergraduate students to help them better understand what's going on in the world of astronomy by making important discoveries and concepts easier to understand.

Since distilling scientific concepts into (hopefully) easier-to-understand forms is something I've been doing sporadically on this blog for the past—wow, seven years‽ Has it really been that long?—anyway, since that's something I already enjoy doing from time to time, I applied and sent in a sample post in the style of Astrobites for the dealine mid-November, and this week I heard back from the hiring committee that I'd been accepted as a new writer! (You can find the official post that came out today detailing new authors here.)

Usually most writers work for a period of two years (though this is not formally set and can vary), both producing a post of their own and editing another author's post each month. As far as I can tell from the list of past authors there hasn't been anyone from Swinbune before, so I'm blazing a bit of a new trail here. The schedule for next month (which I'll be on) should come out this week, so I can start working on my first official post! (I'll probably use the sample post I submitted, though given another editing pass as I wasn't entirely happy with it even after spending several days working on it.)

Anyway, I'll link to my posts when they come out on Astrobites so you can hopefully look forward to monthly paper summaries from me for the next few years! A hui hou!

Edit: Also, just for fun, we had a hail storm this evening after I got home with hail up to the size of grapes coming down for a few minutes. Never a dull moment in Melbourne!

Clothespin for scale.

Weather in Melbourne

Melbourne weather is strange. Before coming here I'd read multiple things saying that it was highly variable and could change quickly—“If you don't like the weather in Melbourne, just wait fifteen minutes” was a joke I came across that embodies this. Hilo weather is much like this as well, sometimes changing often and quickly throughout the day, so I figured Melbourne weather would be much the same.

Now, this isn't incorrect; the weather here can indeed change pretty quickly throughout the day. However, it also applies on a somewhat longer time scale. For example: it's currently December here, equivalent to June in the northern hemisphere, coming up on the southern hemisphere summer solstice on December 21st…and the high today was 20 °C (68 °F), with an overnight low of 10 °C (50 °F). This isn't exactly what I think of as summer weather, and what's more confusing is that we did have some warm weather for a week or two in November. In fact, just a week ago we had a day of 40 °C (104 °F), where it was still 32 °C (89.6 °F) when I went to bed at 11 PM and still 27 °C (80.6 °F) when I woke up at 2 in the morning. Then a day later a huge storm hit and temperatures dropped precipitously throughout the day, and the day after that the temperatures were in the single digits (Celsius) and I was putting on socks in the morning and getting my coat out of the closet again. People I've talked have indicated this isn't entirely unusual, telling me of a day some years ago when they had a huge hail storm on Christmas, giving them a white Christmas in the middle of summer.

Melbourne is about the same southern latitude (~40°) as the northern latitude of California where I grew up (~39°) so I figured the weather would be roughly similar, but in California this kind of weather would be exceedingly strange. The temperature's more complex than a simple sine curve, of course, but on the scale of a week or so it's not a bad approximation; you don't get over 100+ (Fahrenheit) temperatures one day during the summer and then have temperatures plunging towards freezing two days later. I'm not a big fan of temperature extremes—to either side, but especially cold—so I hope this isn't too common a phenomenon, or it could be a long next few couple of years! A hui hou!

An Australian Mountain Adventure

This Saturday I was invited on a sight-seeing trip to the Dandenongs (a mountain range just to the east of Melbourne) by a family from the church I've been attending, an opportunity I gladly jumped at.

Not the greatest picture as it was taken through the window of the car, but it gets the message across.

We stopped at a few places along the way up the delightfully winding road up the mountains, including a small town with a candy store (sorry, a “lollies shop”) where I picked up a small collection of sweets to try (purely in the spirit of sampling the local culture, of course!). Another place where we stopped for afternoon tea (read: snacks) had a large flock of cockatoos hanging around, plus a few other native birds.

These birds were quite used to being fed, and not shy about hanging around in hopes of food.

…to the point of happily jumping up on the picnic table in front of me!

It was really cool and a bit strange seeing flocks of birds flitting betwixt and sitting in the eucalyptus trees, as we didn't really have many birds that did that back in California, the only ones being the vultures that liked to nest in one particular large dead tree (and didn't do a lot of flitting among the branches, for obvious reasons).

This crimson rosella was perfectly fine walking underneath my seat, making it a little hard to photograph!

In fact, the cockatoos were comfortable enough with people to jump up your shoulder in search of food!

After our tea-time adventure, we hiked to Sherbrooke Falls in the Sherbrooke Forest National Park. On the whole, it reminded me of hiking amongst the redwoods back in California, except with eucalyptus trees instead. And what eucalyptus trees they were! I'd known that certain species of eucalyptus trees are among the tallest trees in the world (behind only redwoods), and having grown up among eucalyptus trees in California I thought I was familiar with their heights, but these trees were something else entirely. It's hard to guess of course, but I felt like many of the trees I saw had to have been at least twice as tall as the tallest eucalyptus trees I'd know previously, again underscoring the similarity to hiking in the redwood forests.

It's hard to tell and I could't get it all in one shot, but this is a tall tree.

The hike to the waterfall was quite pleasant, but the return journey was an adventure. It was a nice day when we set out, but as we started back the sky became cloudy and overcast. Soon we could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, then the tops of the trees were buffeted by an increasingly strong wind. By the time we'd gotten back to the carpark the first few large drops were falling, only for us to realize that we'd returned to the wrong carpark, having taken a wrong turn at one of the several branches in the trail on the way back.

As we regrouped to the map at the trail head and figured out where we were, the rain started coming down in earnest, followed soon after by hail! Luckily there were some other people leaving from the carpark due to the rain so our driver was able to get a ride back to the car and come back to pick us up where we were huddled beneath the increasingly-inadequate shelter of the tiny structure protecting the map as rain and hail pelted the ground around.

Thankfully we made it back through the hail and storm all right (though it was coming down fast enough to have significant water on the road in places), but it certainly made for quite the adventure! A hui hou!

Watching Wild Winds with Windyty.com

Today the rather awesome website Windyty was brought to my attention, which shows these amazing animated maps of various weather conditions over the entire planet, vector maps of wind speed being the default. As I was excitedly ranging to and fro about the whole Earth, I took a look at the Pacific and discovered the rather ominous scene below (you can click and drag to move in, and scroll to change the zoom level):



Those two spiraling vortices are hurricanes Madeline (left) and Lester (right), both Category 3 hurricanes as of the time of this writing, and both bearing down on the location of my abode. Some models have Madeline narrowly missing the Big Island, other have it making direct landfall, but they generally agree that it'll happen sometime Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning. Thankfully, they're also projecting it to drop in strength to a Category 1, or even a mere tropical storm. There are predictions for between 6–15 inches of rain, though we had a little over 6 inches last Tuesday and that wasn't even a tropical storm.

Lester is further out and thus more poorly constrained, but it's possible it could hit as well sometime around the end of the week, though again, it could miss and will likely drop in strength before that happens.

As I've occasionally said before, life's never boring when you live on a volcano in the middle of the Pacific! Looks like the wind's picking up a bit as I write this, and it just started raining as well. While the map above is constrained to show the weather around the time I'm writing this (August 30, ~2:00 PM), the one below is set to the most recent actual forecast, so you can watch it over the rest of the week if you want to watch what the hurricanes do. A hui hou!




Update, August 31, 12:00 PM: The wind pattern picture from this point in time is just so cool I had to share it. Hurricane Madeline is starting to head down south of the island, and it's interesting how the wind speed is high in the ʻAlenuihāhā channel between Hawaiʻi and Maui (famed for its wind-funneling effect) but mostly pretty low over Hawaiʻi itself.

Hurricane Darby

I just discovered that, as of yesterday, I've now experienced two-fifths of all the tropical cyclones of tropical storm strength or higher that have ever made landfall on one of the major islands in the state of Hawaii since records began in 1949, as Hurricane Darby made landfall down in Kaʻū on Saturday as a tropical storm. (The other four landfalls were an unnamed storm in 1958, Hurricane Dot in 1959, Hurricane Iniki in 1992, and Tropical Storm Iselle in 2014, the other landfall I experienced.)

While Darby got as strong as Category 3 on its trip through the Pacific prior to arrival, by the time it made landfall it had been downgraded to a tropical storm. While I don't know what kind of havoc it wreaked down in Kaʻū, its effects in Hilo were mostly limited to some heavy rain Friday night and Saturday morning and some intermittant gusts of wind and light rain the rest of the day, plus some cloud cover for most of today.

Anyway, I just figured I'd let everyone know I made it through all right. A hui hou!

Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and the Whirlpool Galaxy

Some of you are probably aware that here in Hawaii we just had the first hurricane landfall in twenty-two years. Hurricane Iselle made landfall late Thursday afternoon (although it was downgraded to a tropical storm about the same time), becoming the first hurricane to hit the Hawaiian islands since Hurricane Iniki hit Kaua'i in 1992, and the first cyclonic tropical storm to make landfall on Hawai'i island itself since 1958 (when it was only known as “Tropical Storm Seven”).

For a while it seemed like hurricane Julio might follow in its metaphorical footsteps, but it appears to have swung north and not be a threat anymore. Thankfully, Iselle doesn't seem to have caused any catastrophic damage (in the sense that no lives were lost), although it certainly downed a lot of trees, and a lot of people south of Hilo in Puna suffered power outages (and since most people down there are on their own wells or catchment tanks, losing electricity means losing water too). I came through the storm with only a few flickers of the lights, though I was beginning to worry about the structural integrity of my roof in some of the stronger gusts of wind.

Speaking of gusts, that was probably the part of the storm that surprised me the most. I had assumed that the intensity of the storm would more-or-less smoothly rise, peak, perhaps stay high for a while, then gradually fall. Instead, relatively long periods of calm would be interspersed with periods of torrential rain and howling wind. And when I say calm, it really was quite calm; little or no rain, and the air almost dead still. All in all not what I had expected.

Thinking it over after the fact, this periodic series of heavy weather followed by relative calm put me in mind of the typical appearance of a hurricane, that of a spiral with many arms...in fact, very similar in appearance to something else I know a lot about, spiral galaxies.

The picture below was inspired by an incident at work, where both me and a co-worker independently, upon seeing the picture of hurricane Iselle shown below in the newspaper, remarked that it looked highly reminiscent of a famous spiral galaxy, in this case, Messier 51, also known as the Whirlpool galaxy.

I think it was the long arm of Iselle on the right that put me and my co-worker in mind of M51 (although there's nothing corresponding to M51's little companion galaxy NGC 5195 seen below it).  There are other differences, but I find this comparison of two spirals of such vastly differing sizes appealing.

M51 also hold a special place in my heart for being the location of the very first supernova I ever managed to photograph, a little over three years ago now.

Oh, and to justify the "Earthquakes" in the title, about 6:30 Thursday morning, a scant few hours before Iselle hit, we had a small earthquake (magnitude-4.5 on the Richter scale) up near Waimea. It wasn't enough to wake me (4.5 is just a bit above the threshold it's possible for humans to detect), but our telescope operator on duty noted it (and at first thought it was just someone walking up the stairs to the control room!). As I've said before, life's never dull when you're living on a live volcano in the middle of the mighty Pacific ocean!

Science Clock Series: Part XII

This little series is finally drawing to a close with today's number, which comes from meteorology, and is given by:

\[\text{hurricane (Beaufort scale)}\] This is another straightforward number from the realm of atmospheric science. The Beaufort scale (officially the "Beaufort wind force scale") is a system devised by a certain Sir Francis Beaufort in 1805 as a way to standardize the reporting of wind speeds by ships and weather centers.

Wind speed can be fairly subjective – one person's "stiff breeze" might be another's "light wind," for instance – and it was long recognized that a standardized system for measuring wind speed would be a good thing. Beaufort wasn't the first to work on such a scale, but his position in the British Royal Navy in the 1830s allowed him to get his officially adopted.

The Beaufort scale has twelve categories, going from 1 (completely calm) to 12 (hurricane force winds). The categories were originally defined by the effects they produced (on the ocean, on ships' sails, or on various terrestrial objects), due to the difficulty in measuring the wind speed directly. Once practical, reliable anemometers (wind-speed measuring devices) became widespread, the different categories became defined by specific wind speeds as well.

Beaufort originally defined the scale to go up to 12, but in 1946 an extended scale was proposed going all the way up to 16. The wind speeds in this range are pretty much only encountered in tropical cyclones, and the extension only ever caught on in Taiwan and China, both of which deal with tropical cyclones on a frequent basis.

I'd reproduce the Beaufort scale table in this post, but unlike the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, it's pretty long and involved. If you're interested, I suggest perusing it on Wikipedia at the link just above.

And with that, this series is officially over. It was an interesting experience; I learned some things myself, both about the subjects in question and in running a series of posts. I apologize for the tardiness with which I've been updating lately; I sometimes found that having a set subject to post about next left me undermotivated.

Anyway, it's over now, and I have a couple of new post ideas in mind. What will come next? You'll just have to wait and see. A hui hou!

Weather in Hilo

One of the nice things about living in Hilo is getting to see weather displays like the one below from time to time.

This comes from the Sun going down above the roof of the building next to where I work. It had been raining off and on all day, and on my way to work in the morning I was actually trying to get pictures of the puddle-reflection of a vibrant rainbow that was in the sky. None of them really came out well enough to post, sadly. Maybe next time. It sure made a pretty reflection in the puddle, shivering each time a drop of water well from the power line above or a passing car stirred the surface in its wake.

Climbing Mauna Loa

Last week I had the amazing opportunity to hike the summit of Mauna Loa with a few friends.

Mauna Loa, if you don't know, is the largest volcano on Earth, and second in the Solar System only to Olympus Mons on Mars. It is estimated to have a volume of 18,000 cubic miles of rock (75,000 km³), that is, 375 times the size of Mount Hood, enough to fill the Grand Canyon 18 times over, and more than the entire Sierra Nevada range. It achieves this great volume by being not only incredibly tall (almost 56,000 feet [17 km] from the ocean floor), but incredibly flat. The overall slope of the mountain doesn't exceed 12°, which, despite its great height, makes it rather hard to see when you're directly on it. From Hilo, Mauna Loa just looks like a big hill, while Mauna Kea (which is only 120 feet [36 m] taller than it) looks like a looming mountain. The name Mauna Loa means “Long Mountain” in Hawaiian, and as I quickly discovered, it could not be more appropriate.

We got out of Hilo a bit late, and the fact that the road from the Saddle road up to the Mauna Loa Observatories is a big pot-hole-y mess meant we didn't arrive at the 11,000 foot mark until 8:40 AM, at which point we left the car and began hiking [edit from the future: how funny that by 2017 the road would be entirely paved, and an easier drive than Mauna Kea]. Now, being the over-prepared nerd that I am I had taken the opportunity beforehand to thoroughly inspect our route on Google Earth, so that I would have at the very least a mental map in case I couldn't get reception, or the weather suddenly turned nasty and we couldn't navigate. The smooth slope of Mauna Loa actually makes it somewhat difficult to determine which way is mauka (uphill, away from the sea) or makai (downhill, seaward) in places.

Anyway, on Google Earth there was a very clearly defined route traveling up the mountain via several switch backs that petered out just below the rim of North Pit, a small secondary crater on the edge of the summit caldera, which is named Mokuʻāweoweo.  (Mokuʻāweoweo is an absolutely huge crater, 1.5 miles wide and 3 miles long. North Pit is small only in comparison, and is probably a mile in diameter.) I naturally assumed that this was the “6 mile trail” mentioned on several websites, and that it would be a fairly simple matter to just walk up the nice, gentle slope of Mauna Loa's flank.

Since no one else was showing any signs of navigation, I assumed the position (aided by the fact that I had excellent reception [and access to Google Maps] the entire way up) and bravely led the group up the fork of the trail that led up the mountain, rather than the mysterious fork that appeared to continue on around the mountain. Or, rather, I pointed the way out to the group and huffed and puffed along behind them in the thin atmosphere. Along the way I turned around long enough to snap the following picture of Mauna Loa in the early morning light:

Mauna Kea in all its glory. So pretty...

In the slightly zoomed-in image below, you can make out several observatories on the summit (I see the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, Subaru, the Caltech Sub-millimeter Observatory, Keck I & II, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Gemini North, and the UH 88-inch telescope) and can even spot the limits of Mauna Kea's glaciers as a fairly distinct line encircling the mountain about a third of the way down from the summit.

Observatories on Mauna Kea, and the line marking the extent of glaciation.

Breathing at altitude is funny stuff. The slightest exertion leaves you breathing heavily, and heavy exertion has you gasping. By the end of the day I was beginning to worry I'd cracked every rib in my body from the force of my breathing alone. (Thankfully, that healed up in about two day. But boy, when it hurts to breathe, every day seems like an eternity.)

Anyway, we continued on our merry oxygen-deprived way for an hour. Then two. Then another. And another. Finally, after five hours of almost non-stop walking, at long last we we reached the edge of North Pit. Oh, and did I mention that the clouds came in and started dropping sleet on us (yes, sleet) about noon?

Trying to get out of the constant light sleet I clamored down the edge of North Pit, found a slight outcropping of the crater rim, and proceeded to eat the small lunch I had brought with me. It was quite exciting to be sitting on the frozen surface of a vast lava sea, knowing that the volcano had been active a mere twenty-eight years earlier, and that a vast magma chamber lurked only a little less than two miles below my feet. I was able to put together the following panorama while I was sitting there.
Edit (3/17/18): I redid the panorama using Hugin, but you can still see the original by mousing over the image.

This picture was taken in a rare five-minute period when the sun broke through the clouds. Off in the distance, just below the far wall of North Pit you can see steam rising from the floor of the crater. (Probably from rain landing on rocks heated by the sun I hasten to add, not because they were being heated by magma underneath!) Further off you can see through the break in the wall of Mokuʻāweoweo, and even see the highest part of the crater rim near the center of the image.

By this time, it was already 2 in the afternoon, the sleet was switching to rain and back again and showing no signs of letting up, and we still had to walk down, so after eating a woefully late lunch we started the trek back down. I was happy when we got low enough for the sleet to stop, until it was replaced by rain. That morning I had made the decision to wear my (lighter, non-water-proof) fleece in favor of my (heavier, water-proof) coat, so everything I had very slowly began to moisten as we walked down. That actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because my damp clothes kept me from overheating and kept my body temperature just about perfect the entire way down. Thankfully the rain never got heavier than a light drizzle.

Three hours after we left the summit we finally staggered back to car, whereupon we had another hour-and-a-half drive back to civilization. I haven't heard of any lasting injuries, but we were all stiff and sore for the next few days.

Mauna Loa is an absolutely fascinating mountain, especially when you compare it with its near sibling Mauna Kea. The lava on Mauna Loa is obviously much newer and fresher than on Mauna Kea, where most lava flows have been covered by either cinder, glacial deposits, or vegetation. (There are some places near Mauna Kea's summit where you can see the exposed flows, usually deeply scarred from the glaciers they erupted under.) On Mauna Loa, lava flows stand out stark and fresh. They also weather to a different color; while old lava on Mauna Kea oxidizes to a reddish-brown color, Mauna Loa's lava goes more for a straight brown. It's very neat to be driving through a patch of black lava, probably less than a hundred years old, and come across a small kīpuka of much older brown lava that didn't get covered in the middle of it. There is a lot of older lava on Mauna Loa (take a look at the picture below for some) and it's fascinating to think about what Mauna Kea must have looked like before it began its post-shield phase and covered everything with a layer of cinder. Alternatively, it's really cool to imagine Mauna Loa after it enters its post-shield phase and starts erupting cinder and cinder cones all over.

A fairly old lava flow on Mauna Loa's flank.
Note how the lava is starting to crumble and flake off.

All in all it was an incredible experience, though one I am in no hurry to replicate. In fact, after we got back and started mentioning it to others more familiar with the mountain, it turned out that we had missed the actual trail and taken the vehicle trail. (Turns out it was that mysterious fork after all.) So instead of a 12.2 mile round trip, it was probably more like 15-20. Because it took us so long to reach the summit we were in no position to actually explore or look around, so we didn't make it to either the true summit on the west side of the crater or the location of the historic Wilkes Expedition campsite on the east side. (The Wilkes Expedition was part of the U.S. Exploring Expedition to the Pacific, a push by the young United States to explore the Pacific for scientific and commercial reasons that lasted from 1838 to 1842. Fun fact: the site of Wilkes' campsite on the rim of Mokuʻāweoweo is the only physical evidence in the Pacific that remains of the entire expedition.)

Now that I know where the trail really is, I wouldn't mind going back some day (hopefully one with better weather) and trying again for the summit. Because despite the discomfort and days of soreness, there's something incredibly cool about standing on an active volcano so far removed from sea level and civilization.

I'm going to close this post by linking to a chapter from a book called Life in Hawaii by Titus Coan, an early American missionary. He describes Mauna Loa's great eruption of 1855-56 that came within a few miles of destroying Hilo. He describes ascending to over 12,000 feet to find the source of the eruption, watching it for many days, trying to cross it in full flood (!!!), and a whole bunch of other incredibly nifty observations about it. It's a long read, but I suspect that once you start you won't be able to stop reading it. Here it is: The Eruption of 1855.

Mauna Kea Snow.

This week while working up at the Vis on Mauna Kea, I was called in early Tuesday morning (about 7:30) because the road to the summit needed to be closed to visitors. At that point, although there was a large mass of clouds off to the east, the weather was actually pretty nice, not raining or blowing, blue sky off to the east, not overly cold for the altitude and time of day. Fifteen minutes later, it was snowing pretty good. Since I can count the number of times I've experienced snow falling from the sky on two hands, this was a pretty big experience for me. (Thankfully I was sitting inside an idling vehicle blocking the summit road, not actually out in the snow.)

Getting snow down at the level of the Visitor Information Station, at 9,200 feet, is really quite rare. It snowed for perhaps 20 to 30 minutes before turning to a frigid rain that lasted the entire remainder of the day without pause. The snow all melted up to maybe 11,000 feet within 3 hours, but it was real pretty while it lasted. I even managed to get some pictures of it:

Looking up the summit access road, from my vantage point parked half across it.

More of the mountain slope above the Hale Pōhaku area.

I must say, snow's not so bad when sea level and warmth is just 45 minutes' drive away. I certainly wouldn't want to live with the stuff for any appreciable length of time, though.

Telescopes and Snow

This past Thursday my Observational Astronomy class got to go on a field trip to Mauna Kea, where we were treated to tours of three of the observatories up there: the Gemini North facility, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, and Hōkū Kea, the telescope that will eventually be for undergraduate students at UH Hilo when they finish fixing it.

We've had quite the storm system washing over the island this past week, so there was actually snow on Mauna Kea when we went up -- and not just "small piles in places the sun hasn't melted yet", but "a pretty good covering". Since I could probably count the number of times I've been around snow on my fingers and toes, it was pretty impressive to me.

Puʻu Hau Kea (Cinder Cone of White Snow)

Looking back whence we came.

Puʻu Makanaka (the large one. I don't know what Makanaka means, perhaps a proper name)

From left to right: Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, Gemini North, the UH 88-inch, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, and Hōkū Kea. All looking very cold.

Part of the Sub-Millimeter Array, standing staunchly amidst the cold.

Having gotten all those distracting pictures of frozen water out of the way, I can proceed to describe the actual objects of our tour. Our first stop was the Gemini North telescope, one of two identical 8.1-meter (that's 27 feet) telescopes built and operated by a consortium of countries. The other, Gemini south, resides in Chili, so that between them the two observatories cover almost the entire night sky. The two domes are identical, and are an imposing sight close up:

The Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope dome, up close.

It's hard to capture the sheer size of a telescope that has more area than the floor of my room in one shot, but I tried. The Gemini telescope is similar in many ways to the Subaru telescope, which is almost the same size. For some reason, they're even painted suspiciously similar shades of blue. I did my best here:

The Gemini North telescope. It is huge.

Since it can be hard to appreciate something when you have nothing mentally to compare it to, have another shot with some crew members working in it (that big box they're standing around is an instrument they're about to put on telescope, and yes, it's so big that they're standing on it):

Removing one instrument and swapping in another.

From Gemini we moved to the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, a 3-meter (9.8 feet) telescope built exclusively for infrared viewing (many of the optical telescopes on Mauna Kea such as the Keck twins, Gemini, Subaru, etc. have the capability to do some limited infrared observing, but IRTF is one of the two telescopes built exclusively for it). IRTF was originally built to support the Voyager missions and to this day at least half of its observing time is taken up by planetary research. Because of this it has a somewhat unusual mount called an English yoke equatorial mount. It's something like two tuning fork stuck with their open ends together, with the telescope free to rotate in between. The advantage of this design is that it is much easier to observer objects that are very near the zenith than would be possible on a regular alt-az mount such as most of the large telescopes on Mauna Kea have.

The NASA Infrared Telescope. Note that same shade of blue paint at the bottom.

Here's another shot from below showing the telescope nestled between the two arms of its yoke:

Showing off the telescope's unusual mount design.

Finally, we ended our time on the summit with a brief tour of Hōkū Kea. It's a mere 0.9 meters, and the entire dome area is probably smaller than Gemini's mirror. It's also apart for maintenance at the moment with the mirror being down for some work, so I didn't get any interesting pictures. There wasn't much to see besides the empty tube, although it too was painted that same shade of blue. I actually asked people at each telescope if there was a reason for the color, but all I got were blank stares so I still don't know. Maybe it was just cheap.

Anyway, after our frosty tour we left to return to the warmth of Hilo, but not before I captured one more snowy landscape in memory:

Looking to the south-west, Hualālai is visible off in the distance through the clouds.

Addendum: If you've read this far you must like pictures, so you may like to check out the post directly before this one. I re-reduced my Andromeda Galaxy picture, and I think it came out a lot nicer. I added it to the post, so you can see both of them and compare. A hui hou!

Rainbow Redux.

Today I went on my first summit tour since before the beginning of the semester. As usual, me bringing my camera caused the weather to be unusually cloudy, up past the Vis and part way up to the summit. From the top, everywhere you looked as far as the eye could see was nothing but a roiling sea of clouds. Driving both to and from Hilo was in constant, heavy rain, along with some pretty thick fog. It did have its perks, though. On the way up, we saw a tiny, close-up rainbow, which I managed to get a (shabby) picture of:

Even more entertaining was the rainbow we saw on our way back down, which appeared to intersect the road right in front of us!

I've been informed that I will have Internet access up at Hale Pōhaku, so I will try to keep you informed while I'm up observing on the mountain. A hui hou!