Hawaiian Damselfish
Author: Andrew
An electrical engineer, amateur astronomer, and diver, living and working on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i.
Midnight Run
The phone rang just as I was going to bed.
This phone call had a number I knew all too well, even without the caller ID showing the name… K1 Remote Operations. A this time of night it would be a problem, a serious problem. This particular problem would have me on the road back to the summit an hour later.
I really did not want to head back up. I had just gotten down a few hours ago, having spent the day on the summit working on the usual long list of things that need to get done. Days on the summit, in the thin air of nearly 14,000ft elevation are physically draining.
The irony of this malfunction is that I had seen it before. The dome had tripped out inexplicably on previous occasions. The problem would occur then disappear. Once it vanished you could not troubleshoot it. Unlike most of our other systems there are no logs from the shutter drive, nothing records what was going wrong.
The Friday before this it had happened to me again. But this time was different, I had a maintenance computer attached to the PLC serial port. This time I saw the error, something in the code labeled speed mismatch. No idea what this was, or how it worked. Again the error disappeared, and I could not troubleshoot further as the weather was getting worse. No opening the shutters again.
Puna Glow
Puna is glowing.
Not a good glow when you consider that glow is from a raging river of lava between fissure 8 and the sea at Kapoho. Still it can be pretty under the rising Milky Way. I stayed late at work and took a few photos on the way down the mauna. Click on the image for full scale goodness…
4K Screen Backgrounds
I was just re-editing one of my photos for use as a background. In my life complicated by multiple computers, many of which are virtual, I use unique screen backgrounds to remind myself which computer I am on.
These are sized for the newer 4K monitors at 3840 x 2160, which is the usual 16:9 aspect ratio now used for most monitors. The images should display well on full HD monitors as well. You can use these for personal use only, no commercial use or re-posting to other services!
Use the ‘full size’ link under the image to download it.
White-Margin Nudibranch (Glossodoris rufomarginata) on the Kona coast
The glow from a lava lake in Halemaʻumaʻu lights the clouds prior to the May 2018 eruptions
A fern (Microlepia strigosa) growing in an aʻa lava flow along the Puʻu Oʻo Trail
The Moon taken with a Canon 6D and a 8″ Meade LX200 telescope
A pair of AO lasers used to observe the central region of the Milky Way Galaxy emerge from Keck 1 and Keck 2
A few inches of snow do not prevent the Keck Observatory day crew from going to work
Enhanced sky glow due to geomagnetic activity softly lights the sky over Mauna Loa
Zodiacal Light over the Keck telescopes
Pink knotweed (Persicaria capitata) in bloom along the Puʻu Oʻo trail
Lava Fountain
New Moon
Helicopter Ride
Heliport
The Wai‘ōpae Tide Pools
One of the most beautiful places on the island is gone.
And they were popular, on any given day a couple dozen locals and tourists could be seen exploring the pools. You could swim across one or two, then have to climb across a few feet of old pahoehoe lava to drop into the next. The more adventurous were rewarded with even richer coral in the outermost pools where the ocean waves created more challenging swimming conditions.
Kapoho is Doomed
