Fresh Snow
Author: Andrew
An electrical engineer, amateur astronomer, and diver, living and working on the island of Hawaiʻi.
A Snow Week
With a decent snowfall atop Mauna Kea my week was one of snow, and more snow. It was a week of problems and beauty.
The snow started falling on the 10th, a blanket of white covering the mauna. As the observatory crews pulled out and the road was closed we watched the storm on the webcams. While it snowed on the summit near record rains and flooding hit Hilo along with much of the windward side.
While a few guys from our summit crew made short visits to check on things, for the most part work on the summit was paused through the weekend, conditions inoperable.
It was not until Tuesday that the snowplows cleared the snowdrifts and access was partially restored. With delayed tasks to do I drove up that morning into a spectacular dawn over the mauna.
Continue reading “A Snow Week”Twilight Telescopes
Sunrise Along the Morning Commute
Violet and a Meteor
Cane Toad
Living in the Protest Bubble
Given my interactions with various protesters I have wondered just what information is exchanged in the camp privately among those who have been living there. I wonder how that information has shaped their views and driven the core of the Kia’i movement.
My worry is that the camp is serving as an environment where a more extreme stance in this controversy can be created and thrive.
The recipe for this is simple… Take a number of people that already share the same views, isolate them together, and bring in speakers and teachers that amplify the message. The result of this process is well understood in human psychology.
One of the common statements from those in the camp, one repeated over and over, is to come on up and live in the camp, only then you will understand.
Continue reading “Living in the Protest Bubble”The 2019 Gallery
2019 is recorded in photos here on DarkerView.
Top Posts of 2019
The top posts of 2019 are a little different than I have seen in the past. Usually it is a mix of a few big hit posts that were linked on other sites and a lot of older posts that have long lives.
This year DarkerView’s traffic was dominated by the controversy on Mauna Kea. Publishing a series of posts on specific issues resulted in a lot of shares, mostly on FaceBook that drove traffic.
TMT supporters would routinely link DarkerView to provide more information in the raging online arguments that drove so much of the controversy. I can only hope that the posts had some effect in countering the dizzying amount of misinformation that featured in these arguments.
Of course the Backyard Telescope Pier article continues to be the most popular long term post. This post has been on every DarkerView top post list since I started the blog. A number of other similar reference posts can be found in the top post lists.
Overall DarkerView had 74,125 page views from 39,679 unique visitors, a large increase from the 46,707 views of 2018, almost double.
Betelgeuse Fading
Something is definitely not right with Orion. For anyone familiar with the sky the constellation just looks wrong with Betelgeuse at half its normal brilliance.
We have long known Betelgeuse is a dying star, in the last stages of its life. Old stars tend to be unstable, changing in brightness. Betelgeuse has always varied a bit, but this is the largest change on record.
It is odd to see such an iconic star change so dramatically, a reminder that not even the stars are permanent.
The photo tends to flatten the magnitude of stars, the difference is not as obvious. You need to step outside and look for yourself. Orion currently rises late in the evening.