TMT Receives Final Approval

By now you should have heard… The approval made national and international news. The Hawai’i state Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) has granted final approval to the Conservation District Use Permit. This marks the end of the contested case hearing, essentially the final legal hurdle for construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope.

TMT Rendering
An overhead view of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope, credit TMT Observatory Corporation
This occurs after years of moving through the approval process including dozens of hearings, public meetings, lawsuits, and more. This should be the last major legal challenge that the project will face. If everything goes to plan construction should break ground about this time next year. In the meantime a number of other processes may start, including geotechnical work and local staffing.

It is in reading the decision that you can learn much about the process. The news articles rarely cover anything beyond superficial details. The legal documents cover the arguments against building TMT atop Mauna Kea in great detail. The decision just published includes a legal response to all of the issues raised including references to each applicable statute and precedents.

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Postcard from the Reef – The Horn of Urchin Death

Horned helmet snails feed on sea urchins. The snails are easy to spot once you know what to look for, a shape in the sand. The snail may appear like an abandoned shell on first examination, the top covered with algae. It is the size that is surprising, these snails are huge, the shell well over a foot long and almost as much in diameter.

If an urchin wanders by this snail comes to life, heaving itself out of the sand and moving towards its prey. The large foot appears, lifting the ponderous mass off the ground. A pair of tentacles with small black eyes on the sides appear, sweeping about to search for prey. Once the urchin is located the reaction is surprisingly swift, the snail heaves forward to engulf the hapless urchin.

Horned Helmet Snail
Horned helmet snail (Cassis cornuta) pouncing on a collector urchin (Tripneustes gratilla)

Adventures on eBay

DS1013S Delay Line
A DS1013S delay line IC photographed for an eBay sale
My big project over the last month has been cleaning out the garage. Not the easy part either, but going through the pile of electronics parts I have on hand and organizing. Part of that organization is culling out and reducing the pile, a task that must be done every few years. I have repeatedly filled the trash can beside my workbench. Scrapping or simply throwing out some of the accumulated parts and bits. Some stuff is just obsolete, some is well past any sort of reasonable shelf life, some I just do not need anymore.

There is some stuff that could have some value. Components and gear that could be sold, for that stuff there is eBay. I have eight listings active right now, and a few more I need to set up. Much of the stuff is electronic components, ICs and DC-DC converters. I am making some money from this stuff, not a lot, a few hundred dollars so far, perhaps enough to buy a few new toys.

A Trip Up The Coast

We limped back in on one engine.

An odd sound alerted Dennis to something amiss, a chuffing sound that the engine does not normally make. Opening the hatch showed more trouble, the engine had dumped all its oil into the bilge. It could be something bad, or something really bad, no way to find out without taking things apart, not something we were not prepared to do.

Nudi Photography
Pete photographing a nudi in a cave at The Pentagon
Already moored at the dive site buoy we decided to forget about the engine, at least for a little while, and do the dive.

Conditions were decent, but not great, some surge was stirring up the water. Faint echoes of whale-song could still be heard, probably the last we will hear this season.

Just underneath the mooring at Pentagon is a wonderful complex of caves, this was where we spent much of the dive. This is a great dive site, a shallow coral plain pocked with numerous caves and small sandy areas. It is a good place to look for invertebrates, big and small. The caves shelter nudibranch and other small critters. The sand patches are home to one of the largest invertebrates found on Hawaiian reefs, the horned trumpet snail.

I located a species of nudibranch that was new to me, the snow-goddess nudibranch (Ardeadoris poliahu). A pretty animal about 4cm long among the algae covered rock in a cave. The nudi was nicely positioned on a boulder in a cave, no problem to photograph, except for the surge sweeping me back and forth. I also found a gold-lace nudibranch that was well positioned for photography. I got some good photos, so did Pete when I showed him where to find the critters.

We would head home on a single engine without making a second dive for the day. Never having done this we all wondered how fast we would go on a single engine and how long it would take to return to harbor. We were a long way north, over twenty miles up the coast from Honokohau, the absolute worst time for an engine to fail. Everyone good for docking at midnight? Would we all make it to work tomorrow morning? Our speculation was for naught, we could manage seven knots without straining the remaining engine, we could return to harbor in good time.

The trip back may have been a bit slower, but this was not a problem either. There were humpback whales along the coast. We had good views of several groups as we traveled, including a couple nice breaches right off the bow. Another group, a mother, calf and escort played about in very shallow water at Makalawena. It was just a nice day to be on the water, nobody was in a real hurry to get back to harbor.

The trouble with the engine has turned out to be fairly minor, the oil pressure switch failed, allowing the engine to pump itself empty of oil. A quick and inexpensive fix, but a real mess in the engine compartment.

A little iPhone video of a whale breach, courtesy Deborah

Astronomers Using Keck Observatory Discover Rain Falling from Saturn’s rings

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

NASA funded observations on the W. M. Keck Observatory with analysis led by the University of Leicester, England tracked the “rain” of charged water particles into the atmosphere of Saturn and found the extent of the ring-rain is far greater, and falls across larger areas of the planet, than previously thought. The work reveals the rain influences the composition and temperature structure of parts of Saturn’s upper atmosphere. The paper appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“Saturn is the first planet to show significant interaction between its atmosphere and ring system,” said James O’Donoghue, the paper’s lead author and a postgraduate researcher at Leicester. “The main effect of ring rain is that it acts to ‘quench’ the ionosphere of Saturn, severely reducing the electron densities in regions in which it falls.”

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