Andrew

Yet Another Leak

The joys of home ownership continue, but at least not our house this time.

A split PVC fitting sprays water from the house main water supply line.

Walking alongside the house I hear running water so I stop and listen. The sound is obviously a bad leak somewhere, but the sound is not coming from our house. Rather it is the other side of the hedge, under Bill and Gail’s house!

I push through the oleander hedge and listen again, yup… a leak.

Walking around I find Gail home and tell her about the leak. I crawl under their lanai to find a small muddy swamp and the leak right where the main line comes in from the street. Fortunately Bill is in already Kona, a few phone calls and a visit to Lowes and he is headed home with the right part for the fix.

It takes Bill and I ten minutes to make the fix, cutting the PVC, screwing in a new fitting, gluing the old line into the new fitting right where the PVC line from the street changes to copper for the house. Bill hands me parts while I play in the mud. We spend more time chatting than making the fix, waiting for the PVC glue to cure before applying pressure to test.

No problem with the repair, it was done right from the start. A problem solved and a good start to the day.

Banana Patch MkII

Back in February it was necessary to perform a distasteful deed… I cut down all of my bananas and used herbicide to kill as much of the root mat as possible. The reason? The plants had been infected with Banana Bunchy Top Virus.

The back yard banana patch has been leveled

The virus stunts the growth of the each stalk, with the leaves becoming dwarfed and bunched up at the top giving rise to the virus common name. Nothing to do but to kill the entire clump, wait a while and start over.

That wait is ending. Over the last week I have dug out the banana patch and prepared it to be a productive bed again.

To this end I have dug a small pit where the old patch was located. About twelve feet by eight, and about 18″ deep. This will be the new banana patch.

Mauna Road

Two missions up into the saddle this week to go comet watching. Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE is rising in the northeast, blocked from view at home by the mauna, need to drive up to where I can see it.

With the comet as an excuse to get out well before dawn I may as well add a few secondary missions to the plan…

Make sure the drone batteries are charged for a few flights to photograph the saddle scenery at sunrise. The lava fields are spectacular at sunrise, one of my favorite places on the island.

The next mission is to photograph pueo along old Saddle Road. I tried two times, both times not a single bird to be seen. Where are the owls?

In any case a couple memorable trips into the dawn.

Looking down the Mauna Loa access road towards Mauna Kea

Fixing a Hole Where the Rain Comes In

A leak in my wife’s sewing room? She is not happy with water dripping on her sewing machine.

Removing shingles and fixing a leak under the solar hot water panels

The leak is right under the solar hot water panels. Hmmm, is one of the mounting points leaking? This might be a PITA to fix.

Getting up on the roof and inspecting reveals this is not likely the case, there is another likely cause… ants. Just under the panel I find that a few shingles are in bad shape, and there are Hawaiian carpenter ants scurrying about when I break away a bit of the failed shingle.

It appears that the cooler environment under the solar panels was to the ants liking and they moved in. A downside to solar panels I had not considered.

Chasing a Comet in the Dawn

Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE

A Bright Comet in the Dawn

We have a bright comet in the dawn sky for a few days. Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE has brightened rapidly over the past few weeks, now about 1st magnitude it can just be seen against the glow of dawn.

I took along Hodepodge to serve as a tracking mount for the TV-76mm scope and a couple cameras to do some comet shooting. The Canon 6D would go with the small ‘scope, the EOS-M5 with a tripod for wide angle shots.

Driving up Waikoloa road I was troubled by a bank of clouds in the Waimea saddle, thus I elected to head for the Humuʻula saddle instead. I ended up in the lava fields along the Mauna Loa access road. The view was perfect, and I had just enough time to get the mount and camera setup as the comet rose.

Mango Season

Mango season is here! We have been eating ripe mangoes for a few weeks now. Mango on ceral, mango smoothies, and a whole dryer load packed up and sent to my mango loving mother in Oregon.

For some reason the fruit on our big tree seems to have come from two different sets, with the first fruit ripening almost a month ago and the majority of the fruit just coming on now after a lull.

Not a huge crop this year, but plenty for our needs. We will be eating mango for a while longer.

A breakfast of granola topped with plenty of fresh mango

Happy 4th of July

Petersburg Fireworks — Fireworks over the Petersburg docks on the 4th of July

The Veil in Hydrogen Alpha

To allow a wider field of view requires changing optics. In this case putting away the TV-76mm telescope and mounting a vintage Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED camera lens.

The Nikkor 180mm is a classic lens, once a favorite of professional film photographers for news and portrait work. Now the lens is out of date, not autofocus, or image stabilized, a bit of very good optics left behind by technology.

Of course, autofocus or image stabilization are useless for astrophotography. With a simple adapter the lens can be mounted to a modern system and used as a fully manual lens in an application where the excellent optical quality can still be appreciated.