A Darker View

Today was an amazingly clear day. The trades are currently blowing the vog to the southwest and away from the archipelago. From the summit of Mauna Kea we could see far more than usual, from the summit of Kohala to the very southeast extremity of the island at Kumukahi Point. We could also see all three plumes from the volcanic activity, from Halema'uma'u, Pu'u O'o and the ocean entry near Kalapana.

Looking to the northwest I was surprised to see more than just Maui, several other outlines were present I did not recognize. It took a little checking on the map to be certain of the identity of each island. Normally it is unusual to see Kaho'olawe, but on this occasion I could clearly see Lanai, and beyond that just a hint of an outline in the haze, Oahu. In a year and a half working on the mountain I had never even seen Lanai.

Unfortunately the camera does not show the scene quite as clearly as the eye. The photo below was radically contrast enhanced and in it you can see quite a few of the islands, but Oahu is barely there. I suspect if I had had a polarizing filter the photo could have shown the islands far more clearly. Still, it was an impressive sight, with five of the islands visible.

After several days of no progress, the paving crew is back at it on Saddle Road. At 7:30 this morning the paving was progressing rapidly, the crew quite a ways from where they started and six trucks of asphalt waiting their turn at the paving machine. A lot of men and equipment were in evidence. This also made for a fairly long wait to proceed past the work zone, with about a fifteen minute wait before the flagger gave the go ahead.

As of this evening the paving had reached MP41 for Hilo traffic and very near MP42 for Kona bound traffic. This is near the bottom of the roller coaster where the road climbs off the military range up to Kilohana. At this rate the crews will be proceeding uphill in the next push, I would expect possibly longer delays as the paving machines get into the set of one lane bridges that make the roller coaster one of the more interesting sections of Saddle Road.

The newly repaved section is certainly pleasant to drive. The section where only one lane of two is paved makes a vivid contrast of the new versus the original pavement condition. In comparison the old pavement looks so bad you just have to ask "We were driving on that?"

The high edge and lack of any real shoulder continues to be the subject of some discussion. The lanes are not any wider than before and the prospect of going off a four to six inch edge is disconcerting to say the least. A full size SUV or pickup could survive, but a smaller passenger car could be badly damaged by going off this edge.

A beautiful natural color shot of the Big Island from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

The photo shows the plume emitted from the new vent at Halema'uma'u streaming off to the southwest under the influence of the tradewinds. This pattern has been entirely typical over the last week, with the trades keeping the skies over the north end of the island, and us, free of vog. The rest of the photo shows typical cloud conditions for the island. Clouds piling up against the windward side and trailing off the leeward.

I am continually amazed at the amount of spam that is directed at this website. When I checked the reject log again, a month after deleting it, I found it had grown to over 79 megabytes in only 36 days! There were thousands upon thousands of rejected comment postings. I deleted the log in the morning and found that it had grown to 669 rejected messages only ten hours later, a rate of well over a thousand rejections each day.

I did have a dozen comment spams make it through the filters this week, but a few adjustments seems to have stopped that for a while.

The contents of most of these messages were pretty objectionable. Porn seems to be the major subject, followed in a much smaller proportion by medical improbabilities and prescription drug sites.

The entire effort of the spam senders seem to be simply to place links in a site that is well indexed by the search engines. Best guess is that a decent rating by Google attracts the spammers, the price I pay for good content that the search engines seem to like.

The end result is a real hatred for the spammers, the very word 'spam' becoming maligned across the internet. This is an odd lingual dichotomy for me, since in Hawai'i the original version of the word, the canned meat product, is well regarded. My usual supermarket has no less than four feet of an aisle, all four shelves, devoted to Spam. I never knew it came in so many varieties and flavors. When I recently had some it was not as bad as I remembered, though I doubt Spam will ever become a regular part of my diet.

I enjoyed moonrise tonight on the way home, and then enjoyed it again. The first was just after leaving Waimea, a golden full Moon rose over a band of clouds, a beautiful sight as I drove home from work. My drive then takes me deep into the shadow of Mauna Kea, the Moon disappearing behind the bulk of the mountain. A second moonrise found me about ten miles further down the road, with that golden orb rising over the summit. Two beautiful moonrises to grace the end of a long day.

Venus was visible in the golden glow of sunset, mercury right below if you knew to look for it. I saw no sign of Saturn which should have been a ways below the other two, it was probably hidden by a band of clouds that occupied the right spot.

Yes, I did say I was driving home from work on a Saturday. One of the guys on the crew is out with a bad back, and I worked a couple more days on the summit to cover. I was performing some procedures I had never done before, optical alignments in preparation for using the interferometer that night. As a result I will have spent five out of seven days on the summit, quite a bit more than my usual two days a week. I get a day off tomorrow, then back at it Monday. Even tomorrow will not be completely a day off, with an interferometer run in progress there will be some work I need to do from home to check the systems and insure they are ready for the night.

Hopefully the phone stays silent through the night.

Nearly any telescope can be used for public astronomy. Anything that allows the viewer a good view of the objects our universe has to offer. Using a telescope for viewing with the general public is a challenge, the conditions are dramatically different from an observer alone in the dark.

The challenges can be as numerous as the people using your telescope... Many people have never had a chance to view through a telescope and do not know what to expect. Many viewers have various vision impairments and must use glasses or a particular eye. An eyepiece that allows glasses to be worn while viewing is quite helpful. People come in many ages and sizes, from young children to elderly adults. Not everyone is able to move their head and eyes to odd positions, placing the eyepiece in a generally usable position is required.

Those who do public observing regularly have learned that some things work better than others. What is desirable in a telescope used for public work? Portability, fast setup, good eyepiece position, relative immunity to small grasping hands, there are many aspects that can make public observing with a telescope easier and more rewarding to your guests.

Portability - A key aspect of a public presentation telescope is portability. In most cases you must go to the viewers, not the reverse. School yards, public parks, resort lawns, anywhere you get a chance to show people the sky. To do this the telescope needs to be relatively small, quick to setup and be sturdy enough not to suffer any damage or misalignment of the optics when carried wherever needed. Small dobs and SCT's excel at this requirement, both are compact and rugged.

Humanity is in love with light, we are luminophiles who dwell in great metropolises of light. Artificial light pervades our lives... we decorate our dwellings with light, we illuminate our streets, we shine searchlights into the sky to sweep against the darkness. This is understandable when you consider the basic human fear of the dark. We evolved in a world filled with predators that could see better than we could in the darkness, creatures who were at home in the night. Our precise color vision gave us advantages in the daytime, but night was a time to seek a safe place and wait for the light to return. Thus our new ability to create light gives us the power to banish the darkness, a power that is is used to excess.

We have possessed this power for over a century, long enough that no one remembers a time before the electric light. Nearly everyone takes electric light for granted, flick a switch and the light appears with a suddenness that would have been considered magic before electricity was harnessed. We install lights everywhere, the correct placement of lights an art form to some. We have lighting engineers and architects who specialize in dramatic use of electric light. In our love of light we have lost an appreciation for the darkness we once had.

There are a few among us who understand that light is not always good, there is a time for darkness. It takes a distinct effort to accept the darkness, to overcome that ancient instinctive fear. You must spend time in the dark, immerse yourself and learn there is value in the night. You never completely win this battle, you can never erase those deeply rooted ancient fears. But you can push it back to where the night becomes a comfortable place of wonder without the need to turn on a light.

...what warnings I give.

Coming down Saddle Road tonight we encountered thick fog, just as we started on the newly paved section of the road. My warning about the poor markings became somewhat prophetic, as we drove slowly along nicely smooth, but nearly invisible pavement. At least when the grass grew to the edge of the pavement you could see where it was! The temporary markings are reflective, but not nearly as good as the real reflectors used on the rest of the road. All the way from Bradshaw Field to Waiki'i the fog was as thick as anything I have seen in the Saddle.

The poor pavement makings made for interesting and somewhat nervous driving. At least we know the road well, I worried about the tourists coming down the mountain from the VIS, those who have never driven the road at night. On the mile long section between MP39 and MP40, where one lane had been paved, but not the other, there were no markings at all. As we finally reached the end of the repaved area near MP40 we could see the reflectors ahead, including the big pile on the side of the road where they had been dumped, scraped off the road in preparation for paving.

The paving is not much further along than I reported last Friday. The Kona bound lane has been paved to about MP40 and the Hilo bound lane to near MP39. There was little evidence of the paving crew when I came through a little before 11am.

Take care when driving the new pavement at night or in bad weather, it has yet to be properly marked. There are only temporary markings down the center of the road and no reflectors.

...as it seems the Discovery Channel is to begin airing a new show about electronics and hardware hacking! Called Prototype This! it will feature a team of electronics enthusiasts who will put together various projects.

Somewhat in the mold of Mythbusters perhaps. Certainly you can expect robots, smoke, sparks and maybe explosions. Another step in bringing the world of us nerds to the mainstream.

Hat tip to Hack a Day

There will be a nice conjunction of Venus, Mercury and Saturn at sunset tonight. All three will be arranged in a line. Saturn will be about 1° above Mercury and Venus will be 2° above Saturn for viewers in Hawai'i. If you live elsewhere the spacings will be different, but there will still be a close grouping to be seen. It will be low, 10° elevation at 7pm, requiring a clear and cloud free western horizon to see, but the grouping should be bright enough to see even in the fading sunset. Worth giving it a try, but maybe possible only with good conditions or optical aid. Try a pair of binoculars?

An evening apparition of Venus is starting with the planet reaching maximum elongation early in 2009.

Another odd and somewhat misinformed idea popped up in several comments about the potential TMT project...

The small number of long-terms jobs created by the telescope will be insignificant and will filled by mainlanders, not Hawaiians.
- Comment by Treeza on the Honolulu Advertiser Website

I have heard this one before and it is jarringly wrong in face of the reality I see around me every day. On the big telescopes more than half of the crew keeping us on-sky are local, many having grown up in the islands. One of our crew just took a vacation to the mainland, for the first time in his life! These numbers are rough, just based on my quick perusal of the room at our morning meeting. But very few of the people present were "mainlanders".

The Thirty Meter Telescope Project has begun the process of putting an environmental impact statement in place for Mauna Kea. There is a website with information on the process, it looks a little bare bones, but I suspect that will change as the process continues. Sign up for the mailing list if you want updates.

The EIS process includes several opportunities for public input. This includes public meetings, which should be interesting, and probably contentious.