When you want to see the stars, find someplace dark
Last night the Moon and Venus were a mere 2.5° apart. I tried to look for the pair after sunset, but all I was able to see was a dim glow in the clouds. My friend Maureen was luckier, she was able to catch the pair through a gap in the clouds while the same clouds were lit up by the sunset. I am just a little jealous…
There are few opportunities to visit most of the telescopes on Mauna Kea. Only two of the thirteen telescopes maintain any sort of regular public access. Keck opens a viewing gallery during business hours on weekdays and to the MKVIS weekend tours. Subaru provides interior tours, but only with advance reservations. Visiting inside any of the other telescopes is normally not open to the general public, but can be arranged with some work.
Thanks to the work of a few individuals the West Hawai’i Astronomy Club arranged tours of both Gemini and CFHT. Marc Baril was kind enough to arrange the CFHT tour, setting up staff and transportation for the visit. This included a pair of CFHT 4WD vehicles taking folks from Waimea to the summit. Many thanks are owed to Joy Pollard who set up the Gemini portion of the tour. Weekend tours are not normally arranged, but Joy managed to put together the needed staff to allow us to visit the telescope on a Saturday. The result was a couple great tours of these facilities.
The weather was pretty awful, winter weather closing in on the summit for the last couple weeks. We arrived at the summit to encounter patchy snow, dense fog and a bitter chill. This would not be an opportunity to enjoy the stunning vistas or sunset that the summit of Mauna Kea is renowned for, we could barely see the next telescope, much less the sunset. At least the road was open to the public and our tour could go on.
We convened in the control room of the Gemini telescope. Here our guides, Joy and Sonny, explained the operation of the telescope and how the operators controlled everything through the night. Our tour of Gemini ran a bit longer than the scheduled hour. During that hour we toured the control room, the coating facility, and the telescope itself.
A few levels below the main dome floor is the coating facility. This is where the telescope mirror receives a new reflective surface very few years. For a single piece eight meter primary, a vacuum chamber slightly larger is required. The large chamber makes it seem as if there is a flying saucer docked in the lower bay of the telescope building. The many viewing ports and vacuum lines simply adding to the impression.
Again we visited the coating facility, complete with the massive cranes and the vacuum chamber needed to coat mirrors up to three and a half meters in diameter. This facility is also used by the IRTF and UKIRT observatories to coat the primary mirrors for those telescopes. A treat for me was visiting the OHANA interferometer test lab in the coudé room below the telescope. A project I knew a fair amount about, but had never seen.
The tour finally arrived at the telescope itself. The large equatorial design is such a contrast to the alt-azimuth designs of the more modern designs of Gemini, Subaru and Keck. The enormous steel horseshoe and yoke represent a classic design used for large telescopes throughout the 20th century. We wandered about the dome floor, learning about the details of the telescope, the drives, and the instruments. The AO system was scheduled for the night and was mounted to the telescope. While the massive MegaCam prime focus camera was sitting to the side of the telescope.
The hoped for view of sunset from the upper balcony of the CFHT telescope was nothing to write about. Clouds obscuring all but a hint of sunset’s colors. The final treat was instead an opportunity to ride the rotating dome while the telescope slewed. The show highlighted this big machine, a testament to the people who build and operate these telescopes to push the boundaries of human knowledge deep into the universe.
These tours take a fair amount of work to put together, but are very much worth it. I expect we will do another tour in the spring. Perhaps do a couple of the radio telescopes? CSO, JCMT or SMA? Personally I have never had a chance to properly appreciate the sub-millimeter observatories on the summit. CSO is due to be dismantled in a couple years, it would be a good time to visit this groundbreaking facility.
A third bunch of bananas in as many weeks! Yeah, just a few too many bananas around here. Did the cooler weather bring them all on at once? Look for bunches of apple bananas in the Kohala break room at work tomorrow!
In the meantime… Banana smoothies! Two bananas, a cup of plain yogurt, a bit of milk to thin out the mixture, a handful of ice cubes, and a couple heaping spoonfuls of my sister-in-laws strawberry jam. Blend and enjoy!
As we approach solar maximum, large sunspot groups have again become a common sight. The last few years have seen an unusually quiet solar minimum, long stretches of time when not a single sunspot appeared. that has certainly changed, the Sun is now dotted with sunspots, with the occasional monster. At it’s peak, AR1339, seen above, was over 100,000km across. That is larger than 15 Earths, side by side. I mean monster!
The photo was taken with the Canon 60D, a 0.8x TeleVue adaptor, a C-11 and a Thousand Oaks full aperture solar filter.
One of my favorite moons in the solar system has to be Hyperion. This small icy body is one of those truly weird places.
An oblong shape roughly 360 x 200km (220 x 120miles) the moon is composed of primarily water ice with a small amount of rock in the mix. The moon is thought to be highly porous, a loosely held together rubble pile perhaps. This is indicated by the odd appearance of the many impact craters, looking as if the impacting body is absorbed as much as vaporized. The material of the crater walls then slumping back into the void.
My apologies if you have already seen this video, it is making the rounds. On the other hand it is so totally spectacular I just had to post it.
A series of time lapse sequences taken from the International Space Station. There are cities, seas, lightning storms and aurorae, star and skyglow and more. Hit the Vimeo icon for a better description than I can write. Turn off the room lights, expand to full screen and enjoy…
Winter has arrived on Mauna Kea. the last few weeks have brought regular snow, ice and fog to the summit. Quite a few nights have been completely or partially lost to weather. We always wonder what winter will bring. In the last few years I have seen winters with hardly a lost night, and no substantial snowfall. Other winters I have helped dig our way into the building. What the winter of 2011-2012 will bring? We will just deal with what Poli’ahu delivers.
Yes, I have shot the Pleiades many times before. Still, a nice test of the new camera. I was limited to short exposures, 2 minutes in this case, as I was not setup for guiding. I took more frames instead, over thirty exposures of two minutes each for an hour total. After throwing a few out I still had enough to beat down the noise. I expect that with guiding and longer exposures the result would be better, but this wasn’t too bad…
Larry, our PIO officer asked me to write an article about Keck for the North Hawai’i News. He has arranged for us to get a nice one page article into this local weekly paper each month. This month I contributed the text and photos for the Nov 10th edition.
It is interesting to write a piece for a more traditional format. With the added advantage of having a professional do the editing, with feedback. The result is much like the articles I have written for Darker View. Some rehashing of material I have used here, but re-written to provide a more complete story. The photo below is the one chosen by the editor to illustrate the article.
For meteor watchers there is probably no more anticipated show that the annual Leonid Meteor Shower. The Leonids are renowned for reliable showings featuring bright fireballs.
The reputation is not without reason, Leonid events over the last decades have produced spectacular showers. The 2001 Leonids have become legendary, for a few brief hours on the morning of November 17th the shower became a true meteor storm, with rates of more than one thousand meteors an hour visible across the western United States and the Pacific. The sky was constantly peppered with streaks, many dim, but some very bright, every few minutes a fireball would be brilliant enough to light up the landscape. Other observers will mention that the 1998 Leonids produced a impressive number of bright fireballs, making that year particularly memorable.
The Leonid meteor storms incited terror and religious revelation, but also stimulated the study of meteor science. It is from studies of these storms that astronomers began to realize that meteor showers were natural, and predicatable phenomena. This led to the realization that the annual meteor showers were associated with comets with orbits that cross the orbit of the Earth.
Just how impressive a show depends on a set of complex factors, meteor prediction is not an exact science, but astronomers are getting steadily better at these predictions. The meteoroids are found in clouds of debris left behind by a comet. In the case of the Leonids this is comet Temple-Tuttle, which has an orbital period of 33 years. All along the orbit of the comet there is a cloud of debris, small bits of dust and sand sized grains of rock-like material. Prediction is a matter of figuring out how this material will move about under the influences of gravity from the various planets and other factors like the pressure of the solar wind and even sunlight.
Unfortunately for meteor watchers, the 2011 Leonid shower is expected to be fairly weak, with ZHR rates around 20. There are some predicted peaks, due to specific regions of debris left behind by the comet several centuries ago, but the average meteor size is predicted to be quite small, leading to to faint meteors. This is further complicated by a bright waning gibbous Moon present during the shower peak. This is probably not a good year for Leonid observing.