Tag: Mauna Kea

SB2325 Relating to Mauna Kea

As we continue an examination of the proposed legislation concerning Mauna Kea we come to the next bill SB2325. This bill advanced for the 2018 legislative session would require a “forensic financial audit” of the organizations that manage Mauna Kea.

Gemini and UH88 Under Moonlight
Gemini and the UH88 under moonlight
There is very little text to the actual bill, it is quite short, a single page. Notably there is no explanatory justification as is customarily found in the first section most bills. No explanation as to why this legislation is being proposed or why it is needed.

What is there is a laundry list of organizations to be audited starting with the University of Hawaii and the Department of Land and Natural Resources. The list specifically includes the Hawaii Island New Knowledge Fund charity set up to allow observatory contributions to the educational needs of Hawaii Island students.

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Proposed Legislation

There are quite a few different bills proposed for this session of the Hawaii legislature that address astronomy and Mauna Kea. Of the more interesting there are proposals for an independant manangement body for the mauna, 4WD drive access to Mauna Kea and Waipio valley, addressing light pollution, and an audit of OMKM.

Mauna Kea Sunrise
Sunrise over Mauna Kea greets me on the morning commute.
As some of these proposals have a direct effect on the mauna and upon me personally I intend to address each of these proposals in blog posts. I also intend to submit testimony on these bills, reading and blogging on them will help.

Just added! (12Feb2018)

As usual for the Hawaii legislature there is occasionally both a house and senate version some of the bills. These must be reconciled in the end as they wend through the rather interesting process our state lege uses. Several of these have passed first reading, the first weeding out of bills in the process for this session.

A Dark Night at Kaʻohe

A few months back I was reminded that I was remiss in scheduling proper club star parties. Thus I set about fixing that!

Telescope and Observing Table
A telescope and observing table in the dark at Kaʻohe
What about a site? The MKVIS at Hale Pōhaku is a total zoo lately, too many tourists, folks from the club are hesitant to go there for a good dark experience. it can also be cold and windy up there. Since Vaughn left the island a few months back, no one is using the old upper road site at Puʻu Kuainiho.

Thus I compromised at using my favorite site at Kaʻohe. At 5,800ft the site is lower, warmer, and less windy than the VIS. It also represents about half the drive time it takes to get to the VIS, without the tourist crowd. The site is higher and offers more reliable skies than the Puʻu Kuainiho site

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File a Lawsuit, Break the Law in the Process

So… The Office of Hawaiian Affairs filed a lawsuit against the University of Hawaii challenging the lease for the summit of Mauna Kea. This is news across the state, press conferences were held, a big media deal.

OHA Infringement
Screenshot of the OHA website with a stolen image from Darker View
In the process OHA stole two images of mine for their website to illustrate their press releases. Yes, OHA, a state agency, is currently in violation of federal copyright law.

You can see the images here. There are two shots, one of a wrecked Toyota from earlier this year, one of an ancient Hawaiian ahu or shrine high on the mauna.

As one Facebook friend already noted “At least they credited you!” That does not make the infringement go away, it is still infringement. They even left my watermarks and copyright symbol on the image, there is simply no excuse.

Interestingly it appears that OHA, a state agency, does not host their website on a state server. Rather they use Google Cloud Services to host the website. Thus it makes filing a DMCA take-down notice much easier.

I have done just that.

This is not my first DMCA takedown action, or even my third, done this a few times, it works fairly well. The notice goes to the hosting service, if they do not take action, they become legally liable. As a result service providers take DMCA notices fairly seriously.

A legal notice has been served and should be addressed in the next few days. We shall see what the OHA webmasters do with that. Either they remove the material, or the entire website goes poof.

Telescope Moonrise

A tricky shot, taking very precise timing and navigation. I can not claim credit, Sean Goebel did the planning. I just supplied scouting information and came along for the ride.

Mauna Kea Telescope Moonrise
The Moon rising directly behind the telescopes on the summit as seen from near Waikoloa
Sean has been after this photo opportunity for some time. For months he has messaged me to check on the weather over the Waikoloa area each time a full Moon is available. As he has to drive across island to reach the correct locations, a look ahead at the weather can save a great deal of wasted time.

Given that this only involved a fifteen minute drive from the house for me… Why not? Give it a try. Besides, I already had a suitable telescope loaded in the vehicle.

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Shooting Sidereal Timelapse

Another night on the summit for photography, another night of dual lasers working the sky above the Keck telescopes.

Sidereal Drive Platform
A Celestron telescope drive configured as a sidereal rate tracking camera platform
I have never really had a chance to properly use the old Celestron mount for photography after finishing it a few months back. Short tests, but nothing properly following the sky for hours on end as the equipment was meant to do.

It works, and it works very well indeed.

The video below contains 2.5 hours of time-lapse at 15 second for each exposure for 557 frames. Put that together and render at 24fps and you have the following result…

TMT Contested Case Decision

I have to admit I was worried that the decision could go against the TMT project.

It did not.

Retired Judge Riki May Amano
Retired Judge Riki May Amano presides over the TMT contested case hearing
Earlier today hearing officer Judge Ricky May Amano recommended that the TMT project be granted a Conservation District Use Permit or CDUP.

The decision is nearly three hundred pages long, none of us has had a chance to do more than skim some of the more interesting sections. Indeed most of us opened the document and skipped straight to page 260 to read the Recommended Decision and Order first.

TMT Rendering
An overhead view of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope, credit TMT Observatory Corporation
What I have read appears to be a straightforward reading of the law involving land use. Yes, it is a conservation district, that means that there shall be sufficient management of the project, but does not mean that the project cannot proceed.

We have yet to see the outrage from TMT project opponents. I expect it will be shortly forthcoming and quite vehement.

Where do we go from here? As I understand it the next step is for the DLNR board to vote on the acceptance of the hearing officer’s recommendation and reissue the permit. Of course the next thing to happen after that is the inevitable court challenge. This will go straight to the state supreme court as recent legislation set that as the path for land use cases, skipping the lower courts.

A Blue Jet

Having an array of cameras on the summit of Mauna kea that capture images all night long has advantages. While the cameras are intended to allow the telescope operators to monitor the weather, they do catch other atmospheric phenomena.

In this case is it a powerful blue jet, a form of upper atmospheric lightning. While these sort of events had been reported for decades, mostly by aircraft pilots, they were only acknowledged by meteorologists after they were first photographed in 1989.

My friend Steve Cullen first noticed the jet in an image from one of the Gemini North CloudCams. It jets upwards from a strong thunderstorm cell passing north of the island, part of the remains of Hurricane Fernanda.

Unfortunately our Keck CloudCam is pointed just a little too west to have captured this event. The next night our camera captures several red sprites, but they are rather distant.

The various cameras capture sprites and jets with a fair regularity anytime there are strong thunderstorms around the islands. If a hurricane is anywhere in the vicinity it pays to check the archives. This jet is bar far the most impressive yet.

Enjoy the image…

A blue jet as seen from Mauna Kea on the night of 23July, 2017
A blue jet from a thunderstorm passing north of the island. Original image is a CloudCam image courtesy Gemini Observatory/AURA

Update: On Facebook we were having a discussion about how tall the jet was. I calculated the image scale of the camera, a Canon XTi with a 20mm lens, arriving at about 59 arcseconds per pixel. I also measured the jet as 840 pixels high (there is some extension of the upper part in a hard stretch of the image). Thus the jet is 13.74 degrees high, now all you need is distance to the cell.

Tom Polakis found a good satellite image from the night in question showing the storm about 210 miles away from the summit of Mauna Kea. This and a little trigonometry shows the jet rose about 51 miles above the top of the storm clouds!