uma uma waterfall

The Uma uma waterfalls are situated in the World Botanical Gardens, about 17 miles north of Hilo. It’s a three-tiered waterfall where each tier of the waterfall falls into a tranquil pool before cascading on to the next tier.

There is a $6 entrance fee (Kama’aina, $13 for visitors) which isn’t bad, and for that you get the waterfalls, a walk through rain-forest and the gardens. The jewel in the crown is clearly the waterfalls – if you want rain forest and exotic floral variety, I would recommend the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden in Onomea Bay (sorry, don’t know the prices).

A selection of some other pictures that I took are below.

honu at keauhou

It seems to me that we are seeing more and more honu (Green Sea Turtles) in our waters – which is marvellous! We were at the Keauhou Beach Resort this past weekend which is famous for being situated next to one of the better places on the island for snorkelling. It is usually crowded with fish of all sizes and colours, and if you are lucky a honu make come up next to you to feast on the algea growing on the coral. I remember that 10 years ago you’d feel lucky to see one or two of these wonderful animals at any one time. This week, we saw up to 7 honu feeding within the same tide pool!

milky way over mauna kea

The Astronomy Picture of the Day today shows an amazing astrophotograph of the Milky Way as seen from Haleakala on Maui. You can see our Galaxy arching triumphantly over Mauna Kea.

Also, note the tremendous amount of light pollution from Kailua, and the distant glows behind MK – Waimea and Hilo?

chasing sunsets

Andrew has a beautiful image of a Kona sunset over at A Darker View, and it got me thinking about my time this weekend Kona-side. A friend of ours was arriving from UK for a visit and we drove over to pick her up (she was flying into Kona airport). Given the late arrival of the flight, we decided to spend the weekend there.

big picture inauguration

Did you miss the inauguration? Where were you!?

The Big Picture has it covered as you might expect. Have a look at image #3, an impressive satellite view (from the GeoEye satellite – make sure you check out the Gallery) of the throngs building up along the mall between the Capitol building and the Washington Memorial.

National Geographic Traveler photo contest winners

National Geographic have posted the winners of their photo contest. You can see the winners and runners-up by following the link below.

Photo Contest Winners Photo Gallery – National Geographic Traveler.

I think all the photographs are really good but I find the Grand Prize Winner to be the weakest of the lot! Maybe it’s me…

lightroom tip – changing the “before” with Snapshots

This is another little tip that I came across a while ago now. Here I show how to change the ‘before’ image used in the ‘before-and-after’ view in the Develop module.

remembering

“it’s a bit breezy”

This was a quote from our observer of the past few nights as I talked to him last night. They had just abandoned the summit because of the high winds. It is now Saturday morning and, as is customary for most Mauna Kea astronomers, I checked the weather page.

This is what I found in the UH88 panel.

I don’t know if the UH88-inch telescope’s anemometer has got stuck or is broken, but I suspect that it has as 125 mph seems really high to me, especially as you compare to what is currently being measured at the other telescopes. I’ve just tried a couple of reloads over the past 10 minutes and all of the other numbers have updated slightly, except for the wind speed. Comparing to UKIRT (which is next door to UH88-inch) the wind is ONLY at 50 mph.

Looking at the JAC’s meteogram we can see the wind speeds measured at UKIRT and JCMT over the course of the night.

The line at the top is UKIRT and that below is JCMT (which lies in the valley below and west of the summit and so usually registers lower wind speeds). It seems like we hit a peak of 90 mph last night and its about 60 mph as I write this.

I guess it’s fair to say that there is still a stiff breeze blowing.

summit sunrise #4

I haven’t done one of these for a while now as I haven’t been up to the summit since before Christmas. So here’s an image I took on my previous visit, from the gantry of the JCMT, of a snow covered Pu’u. The Sun was rising to the east and I used the light it cast onto the side of the Pu’u to split the composition between light and dark and into something that I thought would look interesting.