When you want to see the stars, find someplace dark
This full moon will feature a penumbral lunar eclipse visible across part of Australia, Central Asia, and eastern Europe. No part of this eclipse will be visible from the Hawaiian Islands. No worries here, we are not missing much, this penumbral eclipse involves only a modest dimming of the Moon.
The AO system was broken, nothing really bad, but something I would need to go up and fix. Reading the nightlogs each morning there are occasionally surprises like this, a sudden re-planning of an otherwise lazy Sunday.
I suspected that the fix would not take me long at all. But I would be on the mountain… What to do with the rest of the day? I load camera and hiking gear along with my backpack of tools. If I do complete the job quickly I will go hiking. The Mauna Kea adze quarry springs to mind as a likely spot to spend a few hours.
The ancient Hawaiians had no access to metal on these volcanic islands. What they did have was a source of very hard volcanic rock. High on Mauna Kea there were once glaciers, a place where the fury and heat of the volcano met ice. Cooling quickly in the icy realm the lava formed a dense, fine grained rock suitable for making tools.
The rock from this quarry could be shaped and ground into a number of tools, particularly adzes that could be used to cut wood or carve the great ocean going canoes. Tools made from this particular rock were so prized that they have been found in archaeological sites on distant islands across the Pacific.
I have known how extensive the adze quarry is for years. The numbers are abstract, number of find sites mapped, square kilometers of area, just numbers on paper. What I found was quite different than what I was expecting, nothing conveys the actuality of being there.
I was amazed at the sheer size of the piles of flakes. These are sites that were worked for centuries, each workshop accumulating many tons of waste rock flake to tumble down the slope. Having worked with my hands continually over my lifetime, I know how hard hand labor like this is. I stood amazed at the sheer amount of human effort it took to accumulate these piles.
I found I had another misconception to correct… Looking from a distance you see the caves with piles of waste rock spilling down. I had assumed that the caves and ledges are where the actual mining took place, where the basalt was pried from the mountain. Visiting one of the workshops I quickly see this is not the case.
Continue reading “Mauna Kea Adze Quarry”It is not snow in the image, but rather hail covering the ground and temporarily turning the summit white. A trough rich in moisture is passing the islands, leading to very active thunderstorms and even hail at the summit. We completed segex today, with thunder rumbling outside the dome. The hail melted off in a few hours, pretty while it lasted…
How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
This is one of those times. A nightlog coded as critical, the Keck 2 adaptive optics system has a slight problem, no output from the white light source, no calibrations, no science. Waiting until after 9am I call the support crew on the summit… Do you know how? No. I wrestle with the thought for a few moments. No avoiding it, I need to drive to the summit.
So how many engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
The Keck Adaptive Optics systems are workhorse scientific instruments. Equipment that has resulted in so many great astronomical discoveries. The AO systems have also seen a great deal of improvements and upgrades through the years. New computers, a new wave-front controller, guide star lasers added, new cameras, different science instruments, and much more.
Eventually I just get fed up with it and insist we spend some time getting rid of it. With no AO use scheduled for a while there is a chance to spend a couple days ripping out this pile of cruft. Identifying and removing unused boxes. Following cables to nowhere, wire cutters in hand to snip away the multitude of nylon zip-ties.
We remove three large armloads of cables and other gear, carring the pile down to the electronics lab for sorting through and disposal. Most of it is horribly obsolete, things like KVM’s for PS/2 style mice and keyboards, or cables for old Sun computers. Most of it will simply be thrown out. It feels so good to get it out of AO and to clean up the place a little.
I called this pile of junk cruft, a word that drew funny looks from my co-workers. You don’t know what cruft is? What sort of nerds are you? Sorry, cruft is what I have always called leftover technical junk.
Cruft is jargon for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for superseded and unused technical and electronic hardware and useless, superfluous or dysfunctional elements in computer software. – Wikipedia
It turns out that the word has a long history in engineering and computer science with a heritage that includes MIT and Harvard. It is indeed the proper word for the detritus that had been accumulating in the AO vault.
Like so many with a Native American heritage I have been watching the protests at Standing Rock, trying to figure out which side of the issue I am on. I find I can not automatically support the tribal side of this as some of my relatives have, the issue is not so clear cut. I have been reading both sides to see where the issue lies.
The incident has much in parallel with the issues here on our mountain. Native people protesting a project that takes place on a purported sacred site. There is also the element of environmentalism in protesting an oil pipeline, and entirely different issue than a clean project like an observatory.
This week’s violent episode has me asking questions. How did this happen? What happened. The protest side has been loudly proclaiming that security guards just attacked them with pepper spray and dogs. They play up the injuries, including some to a child.