The ancient lava flows of South Kohala hold messages from the past. The old Hawaiians often carved petroglyphs into the smooth pāhoehoe along the shoreline. Laboriously pecked into the dark rock are images of men, turtles, canoes and more. Memories from a lost time, messages left by those who lived here so long ago.
Many of the images seem to be similar to modern grafitti, an attempt to make a mark that will be seen by others, maybe to record some memorable deed. Or perhaps simply to leave a mark that will outlive the artist, the hope of immortality carved in stone.
Petroglyphs along the beach at ‘Anaeho’omalu BayIf that was the goal, it worked.
Today, a century or two later, modern visitors can look down and wonder about those who carved the pictures. Did the man with an oar overhead complete some particular feat? Did he win the race against a rival? Complete a first voyage to an island over the horizon and return to boast of the journey?
A box was waiting for me when I got home. A long awaited box. A box that represented hours of reading, weighing and wrestling with the question…
A new camera!
I now have a replacement for my venerable Canon 20Da that I have used for over six years. Not that I will be getting rid of the older camera. It is still invaluable to me for astrophotography, a role it is specifically modified for. Nor will it replace my Canon G11, a camera I have carried every day for well over a year now. The G11 will remain my day to day camera, a role for which a compact is well suited.
The Canon 60D DSLR camera, image credit: Canon USA
No, the 60D will be there when the smaller camera is simply not enough. There have been a few recent instances when I had opportunity for a good photo. An image I knew the camera in my hand simply could not capture. There was that pueo sitting on a lichen covered boulder last week. Or the summit under a blanket of fresh snow, lit by the full moon. Or… To many instances.
Another primary reason for the 60D… High quality HD video capability. This is something I have come to truly miss in my existing cameras. There have been a number of occasions when I really could have used that capability! Unfortunately now that I have a camera capable of truly good HD video, our backyard volcano has stopped producing photogenic lava flows. At least I know that will not last.
The decision was made more difficult by the choice of cameras available. A dizzying array of options now exist. A number of very capable DLSRs, the new mirrorless designs, this was a decision without a simple answer. In the end it came down to a choice between the Canon 60D and the very similar 7D. The newer 60D sports a flip out screen (something I love to have), better movie controls, and while it gives up a metal body it is also much lighter to carry. Both cameras use the same sensor and feature essentially the same image quality.
My thanks to Baron. I ran into him at the ROV competition last week. And lo… he was carrying both the 60D and a 7D. Even better, he let me fondle his gear while we chatted about the relative merits of the two cameras. Nothing like a hands-on look at the gear and the opinion of someone who uses the cameras extensively.
Even when holding a brand new camera I am wondering what will replace it in a few years. Maybe a mirrorless compact? That is a market segment to watch. What about my veteran G11 camera? Deb is making less than subtle suggestions about my getting a G12 so she can have my G11, mostly for underwater I suspect. Cameras are one place the technology is still changing rapidly enough to make these decisions difficult.
For now I need to learn a new camera and find its limits. A good low light session is in order, and I have a night on the summit coming up… with lasers!
Most divers do nothing during their safety stop, I have some trouble doing that. Hanging in the water fifteen feet below the surface for five minutes is sometimes pleasant, sometimes boring.
Also hanging fifteen feet down is the mooring ball, a buoy holding a steel cable near the surface so the dive boats can avoid dropping anchor on the reef. I have made a habit of checking out the growth on the mooring ball and line during my safety stop. I have found hydroids, wire coral gobies, even corals growing here, no real estate goes unclaimed around the reef.
A set of cauliflower corals were growing on this cable, complete with the usual community of critters that find shelter in the branches. Even more convenient, I could rotate the coral colony simply by twisting the cable to which it was attached, giving me a chance for a better photo of a guard crab…
Common guard crab (Trapezia intermedia) in a small cauliflower coral (Pocillopora meandrina) growing on a mooring buoy cable.
Walking through the room I somehow fail to notice just how much equipment is there. At night, with the lights off, the sheer quantity of LED’s and other indicator lights underscore the number of servers and other equipment the room contains. Every direction you look, the room is filled with equipment… The telescope control computer, network switches, terminal servers, instrument servers, the ACS controller and the telescope drive system itself. All necessary to keeping the telescope on-sky…
I have so many photos sitting on the hard drive, projects and ideas that remain un-realized. But every now and then I get around to completing one of those ideas and putting together something worth the effort. A couple winters ago I had an opportunity to shoot an entire 360° panorama from the top of Keck 2. I had set the camera on top of a toolbox and took photos steadily as the dome was moved through one complete rotation. A couple other photos were also taken that I could stitch into the result. The whole project made possible with the panorama features of Photoshop CS5. Twenty images were used to make the pano, resulting in a 105Mb image 26,000 pixels wide. The image shown here is downsized slightly…
It was a great day, on top of the dome after a heavy snowfall, simply stunningly beautiful. Hard work as well, shoveling snow and chipping ice off the dome at nearly fourteen thousand feet. The fellows in the image are Bill Bates (top) and Mike Dahler (below), some of the great guys who keep Keck on-sky. Bill has since retired and is sorely missed on the summit.
The author working on the Keck weather mastI had expected it to be a day of 20mph winds and freezing temperatures. What I got was a balmy 11°C (52°F) and just a gentle breeze. All for the good as I planned to spend several hours hanging off the weather mast installing wiring to improve the new dew point sensor. A cold wind can quickly turn the roof of the observatory into a miserable place.
The original sensor housing had proved to be vulnerable to heavy icing. The new housing should be more resilient, as well as providing better daytime temperature readings. This is due to changing to a different shelter design that uses a fan to move air through the housing past the sensor. I also modified the housing with the addition of a heating element to allow de-icing.
The Keck weather mast covered with several inches of iceTo make the heating element I needed heavy nichrome wire. Not having any on hand I took a trip to the thrift shop. There I bought a used toaster for a couple dollars and spent an hour dismantling the toaster to remove the heating elements. I took the wire and wrapped it through the interior of the instrument housing, creating a heating element that should work quite nicely with a 12V supply, gently warming the housing and melting any ice.
A beautiful day on the summit, nice to spend a few hours atop the roof, hanging in a safety harness from the weather mast. I even remembered to put on some sunscreen to avoid frying in the high altitude sunlight. A new cable pulled through the conduit, the instrument shelter replaced, a little further wiring inside and the job was done. I will have to await another round of bad weather to see if the changes work, but given the trend this winter, I will not have to wait long.
One of the rarer, but very impressive, moray eels of the Hawaiian Islands is the Dragon Moray. This is my first decent sighting of one. Decent meaning I did not see the last bit disappearing into the coral, and actually saw the head for more than a glimpse.
He was staying well out of harm’s way with noisy divers about, deep in an antler coral head. The location also made the eel fairly difficult to photograph. I used my usual in-coral-head technique… zoom in, pray for focus, and nuke the coral head with light.
A Dragon Moray (Enchelycore pardalis) in a coral head at 40ft depth, Suck ‘Em Up Cavern, Kona
A somewhat different picture of the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. Appropriately enough this image of an IR telescope was taken with an IR camera by Mark Devenot, a fellow engineer and photographer in the Keck Operations Department.
Since this is a thermal infrared image, the colors map directly to temperature. In this image the warm asphalt of the road glows bright yellow and the cold patches of snow a cool aqua. Note how well the telescope building and dome are designed, emitting very little infrared, a good feature for an infrared telescope.
The IR camera in question is fairly low resolution, a mere 256×256 pixels, fairly typical in handheld IR cameras. Mark found a way to make an impressive image even with the low pixel count by using some of the artistic filters in Photoshop to process the image. I saw the image and had to share it with my DarkerView readers…
NASA IRTF in an in a thermal infrared image taken with a FLIR PM250 camera, with artist effects added in photoshop, image by Mark Devenot
Until the phone rings… The caller ID shows K1 Control.
Noooo!! It is Christmas Day!
What is wrong now? Time? 4 pm, daycrew should be doing final checks before releasing the telescope, just the time things usually go wrong. ACS?!? It has been creating a lot of trouble lately. Autofill? My usual problem child… No, I checked that already today. HIRES? Tonight’s instrument that I really know nothing about. Nothing to do but answer the phone…
Just Robert calling to say everything is fine and Merry Christmas.
