the glow of the flow

the weather finally broke tonight so we could come up to the summit of mauna kea.... woohoo! after driving along the 4-wheel drive only dirt road for 15 minutes, we started to see snow on the ground leftover from the storms of the last few days. we also saw many local folks driving back down the rough road with the backs of their trucks completely loaded with as much snow as they could possibly fit inside the bed! a mini-mountain of snow that peaked above the cab as you looked at the trucks from the front. i dont know why, but i just thought that was hilarious!

we arrived at the summit in time to see a little bit of the sunset illuminating the patches of snow around the big cinder cone.... but i'm very sad to say... that left my camera back in my dormatory tonight :( oops!! what was i thinking??? hopefully we can come back up tomorrow night so i can get some good shots of the snow. to tide you over, here's one of a lot of little cinder cones and a sunset shot i took in 2003.


that land mass peaking out thru the ocean of clouds is the island of maui!



as the sun sank below the horizon and the clouds began to clear, i came outside to check the sky and play with my new favorite toy in the whole world... night vision goggles!!

its quite amazing how much detail you can see thru these goggles when very little light is visible to your eyes. not only could i walk around with perfect ease, but the sky completely opened up! the newly-brightened comet 17p/holmes was much bigger than anything else and i could easily see a solid central point with an extended fuzzy circle around it. i could make out the 4-degree fuzzy disk of the andromeda galaxy!! i could see more individual stars in the pleiades star cluster (the little tiny dipper) than i have ever resolved with my eyes.

the night vision binoculars dont have any magnification, but they amplify the low levels of infrared and visible light present. the light comes through a lens and into a tube. this tube turns the bundles of light energy, photons, into electrons. as the electrons continue thru the tube, atoms from inside the tube release electrons of similar energy. in this way, thousands of electrons exit the tube when only a few entered! when the electrons exit the tube, they pass thru a coated screen that reacts to the electrons and releases green photons. the photons, in the same position as when they entered the binoculars only amplified thousands of times, pass thru a final lens that focuses them to where our eyes can directly view the image!!

as the sun set i could see a bright green glow thru the goggles on the western horizon, but as i scanned around, i noticed a very bright glow to the southeast coming thru the clouds.... what could that be?? my observing partners informed me that it was the LAVA from the currently active volcanos on the other side of the island!!! i could see the glow of the flow thru the clouds. awesome!

the temperature tonight has dropped consistently, but i keep going outside every hour or so just to find more star clusters and diffuse nebulae with the night vision goggles!

mauna kea thru the fog

not much to report from mauna kea.... because i'm not on the summit :( i'm stuck at hale pohaku, where visiting astronomers sleep and eat. it thunder stormed most of the day and snowed a little at the summit. when there's snow on the telescope dome, there is NO chance of opening, because snow could possibly fall down thru the slit and onto the telescope.... no good at all. so i'm sitting at 9,000ft, working and trying to stay awake until reasonably early in the morning!

unfortunately, the sky is covered with clouds so i will not be able to see any of the morning planets. hopefully this storm will pass by tomorrow night or at least tuesday night so i can see the big telescope in action!!

the clouds provided quite an eerie drive up the mountain yesterday...

kona coffee

there is a kona coffee festival (world famous, apparently) going on right now that started yesterday!! i'm a big fan of good coffee, so i thought it worthy to wake up early and drive 2 hours across the island to the kona region before i came up to the mountain!

i drove to Holualoa Village which is the road along which most of the kona coffee is grown! the farmers set up little tasting booths along the road so you could walk up and down, taste over 20 different types of fanastic coffee, and peak in the many many art galleries!


i had just a few sips of each coffee in order to make my way around the whole circuit... but i still drank a higher-than-healthy amount of coffee. it was nice to taste different types in order to be able to distinguish the flavors.





i eventually snuck in the very pink kona hotel to use the bathroom... and discovered a great view of the Kona coast!








if you stretched this leaf upright, it would be taller than me. it was HUGE... and there were many of them!


the quote of the festival came from a very pleasant coffee grower and brewer: "i meditate so that i can drink as much coffee as i want!"

mmmm... good coffee.

cubic bubbles

what if....

early morning, early november treat!

i dont like waking up early, but luckily this sunday night, i'll be up all night anyway at the gemini-n telescope! everyone else.... if you wake up early monday morning, you'll certainly enjoy all the cool things the universe has in store for you...

three planets are up in the morning right now. venus is incredibly bright, and right beside the waning crescent moon monday morning. above these two beauties, along the ecliptic, hangs a bright, yellowish saturn. continuing upward, you'll see the star regulus (yes, they're still together in the sky, but not quite as close as they were a few weeks ago). still along the ecliptic, and almost overhead, mars shines orange, between gemini, with the bright stars, castor and pollux, and the familiar northern constellation, orion.



depending on where you live, the international space station AND the space shuttle discovery (which is currently docked to the ISS) will be passing overhead!! they fly above mexico and the lower US (around 6am for austin - check out heavens above to see when the ISS passes over your part of the world.) and pass between saturn and mars on the sky.

blogiverse

if youre looking to find some new resources for interesting material about any topic.... or just want to kill time surfin the web... check out the 2007 weblog award nominees. people are creating some great stuff out there and, of course, posting it to the internets!

aloha

today was a long travel day, but i've arrived in HAWAII (!!!) safe and happy. it was nice to take a whole day off of work to read my book and watch movies, even though i was stuck in seats on airplanes the whole time! i'm in hilo on the big island listening to the loudest, highest pitched frogs i've ever heard! i'm tired enough that i think i'll sleep pretty well despite the loud noise!

i've been a pretty successful vegetarian lately, but i admit that i really really enjoyed the ahi tuna i had for dinner tonight! one thing i dont miss about eating fish and meat though, is the bits of food that inevitably get stuck in my teeth. its only fish, meat and popcorn that cause this annoyance. anyway, i'm looking forward to eating more fish over the next two weeks!


saturday i'll be heading up to the summit of mauna kea for 4 nights of observing with the gemini telescope. here are some pictures from my visit to CSO on mauna kea in 2003. i wonder how much has changed.


a new space carnival was published today, er... i mean yesterday. not too long of one, but good reading nonetheless!

happy halloween

a friend made the hat many years ago and gave it to me about two years ago with the promise that i would wear it! so this year i made the rest of the costume!





the dress is actually a graduation gown and the rest comes from a little kids outfit i found at a thrift store. i just cut the pieces up and stitched it all by hand while watching one of the long and rather boring recent baseball games!

fuzzy smudge comet

comet 17p/holmes looks great in the evening sky! night by night it looks more like an extended smudge and less like a point-like star. some of the kids who visited the telescope impressed me with their description of the yellow color, brighter center and fuzzy looking halo. one kid of maybe 10 years seemed confused by the diffuse image, after we had just finished looking at the crisp details of the craters of the moon... but i think he liked the diversity :)

here are a couple nice images of the view thru a 4.4 inch telescope from igor chekalin.

second day after outburst:


day 4 after outburst: