Trumpetfish are stealthy hunters, using their oddly shaped body to strike unsuspecting prey. They are also known to follow large creatures on the reef, turtles or groupers, to take advantage of prey flushed out in their passage. This trumpetfish was using me for the same purpose, hoping to strike whatever the big, noisy diver scared up. The fish hovered quite close to me, not even moving away despite several bright flashes from the strobe. The cave is a very popular dive site, this fish may have learned to use divers to find an easy meal.
A trumpetfish (Aulostomus chinensis) considers the camera
Asteroid 2004 BL86 is not small, it is large enough for astronomers to take notice as it passed near the earth yesterday at a close, but safe distance of 745,000 miles. Numerous telescopes were trained on this object as it passed by, including a deep space radar at Goldstone that confirmed that the asteroid is about 1,100 feet in diameter. They did get a surprise as well, 2004 BL86 has a small moon.
Close approach was earlier in the day, thus it was some hours after that I was able to photograph the asteroid from Hawaii. The most difficult part in taking the photo is locating the object. An asteroid this close by will move across the sky very quickly. To locate the asteroid I used a high precision ephemeris generated by the JPL Horizons Database with time intervals of every half hour. This was necessary as the asteroid was moving several degrees each hour. If I used coordinates even an hour off it would have been out of the frame. It took half an hour of hunting, comparing frames taken a couple minutes apart.
Below is the streak created as the asteroid moves over the course of an eight minute exposure…
Asteroid 2004 BL86 just after close approach on January 26, 2015
The annual 100 best places to eat in the US list for 2015 was published by Yelp this week. A number of Hawaiʻi restaurants make the list, but only one on the Big Island. You will find Da Poke Shack in spot 51, holder of last year’s top spot on the list. Not being a raw fish fan and not getting into Kona very often I can not offer an opinion on that selection. I did wonder what restaurants are best rated for Waimea. Is the list very good?
The remains of the meal litters a table at Hawaiian Style Cafe.Yelp’s reviews are reader generated, and as such are subject to a great deal of personal bias. But with a lot of reviews from a large reader base you would hope that the result averages out to something reasonably accurate. Thus I did a quick search on Kamuela, as Waimea is known to the post office to avoid confusion with the other towns of the same name elsewhere in the state.
The top ten does not look that bad…
Hawaiian Style Cafe
Merriman’s
Village Burger
Red Water Cafe
The Fish and the Hog Market Cafe
Big Island Brewhaus
Yong’s Kalbi
Pau
James Angelo’s Underground Pizza
Aka Sushi Bar
The restaurants any local resident would expect to see are there. I would quibble with the placement of some of these establishments on the list, but there are no surprises here. If you really want to read further I will add my own opinions and comments in the remainder of this post…
Sunday night I shot a wide-field image of the comet as it passed near the Pleiades star cluster. I am somewhat disappointed by the image. The skies over Waikoloa are just not conducive to wide-field imaging. And with a couple scheduled mountain days I did not have the option to take the gear up to where conditions are better. Not and get any sleep. Still, it is not a total disaster…
Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy passing by the Pleiades star cluster
The first good night for comet imaging since the moonlight has departed the evening sky. If is wasn’t clouds it was heavy haze and vog. With a good Saturday night I set up the ‘scope in the driveway and shot for a couple hours on comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy.
This is not a properly processed shot, rather just a quick stack of the longer exposures. The real image will be a few days before I can get about to processing it. Still, a lot of interesting detail in the tail…
Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, a rough processing job on 30 x 4min exposures taken with a Canon 6D and a TV-76mm ‘scope
A team of scientists recently discovered a system of three planets, each just larger than Earth, orbiting a nearby star called EPIC 201367065. The three planets are 1.5-2 times the size of Earth. The outermost planet orbits on the edge of the so-called “habitable zone,” where the temperature may be just right for liquid water, believed necessary to support life, on the planet’s surface. The paper, “A Nearby M Star with Three Transiting Super-Earths Discovered by K2,” was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal today and is available here.
This whimsical cartoon shows the three newly discovered extrasolar planets (right) casting shadows on their host star that can been seen as eclipses, or transits, at Earth (left). Credit: K. Teramura, UH IFA“The compositions of these newfound planets are unknown, but, there is a very real possibility the outer planet is rocky like Earth,” said Erik Petigura, a University of California, Berkeley graduate student who spent a year visiting the UH Institute for Astronomy. “If so, this planet could have the right temperature to support liquid water oceans.”
The planets were confirmed by the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii as well as telescopes in California and Chile.
“Keck’s contribution to this discovery was vital,” said Andrew Howard, a University of Hawaii astronomer on the team. “The adaptive optics image from NIRC2 showed the star hosting these three planets is a single star, not a binary. It showed that the planets are real and not an artifact of some masquerading multi-star system.”
Due to the competitive state of planet finding, and the fact that time on the twin Keck telescopes are scheduled months in advance, the team asked UC Berkeley Astronomer, Imke de Pater to gather some data during her scheduled run.
