This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘White.’ See more responses here.
In the top photo, frothy surf barrels ashore at Upolu in North Kohala. Below that, a cattle egret surveys the scene in the middle of a water fountain. The third photo shows turbines at Hawi Wind Farm against a backdrop of snowy Mauna Kea. And the bottom photo features a bee collecting on a Maiapilo flower.
The sun rises behind Mauna Kea, coloring the sky, and backlighting the telescopes at the summit.
We had a weird weather system settle on the island recently, which provided a week of cloudy, wet weather. It also deposited a decent snowfall on the top of Mauna Kea, which stuck around for a fair while. Maybe it will be a white Christmas after all!
Clouds swirl around Pu’u Ahumoa on the slopes of Mauna Kea. This is an area where clouds often build up during the day and visibility can deteriorate rapidly when they do move in.
Kiawe Trees, and the telescopes at the top of Mauna Kea, are silhouetted against the early morning sky.
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Eerie.’ See more responses here.
I couldn’t think of too many eerie things amongst my photos. This image of trees on the lower slopes of Mauna Kea, shrouded in cloud, is as close as it gets. This is a fairly common occurrence as clouds tend to build up during the day and often reach this area in the afternoons.
Also posted in response to Becky’s October Squares challenge theme of ‘Past Squares – Sky’ (See more responses here), and to the current Friendly Friday challenge theme of ‘Weather’ (See more responses here).
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Going Back….’ See more responses here.
I was thinking about posting photos going back to my first visit to Hawaii, but in looking at them, I realized that I’d never posted photos from my tour of the Subaru Telescope, which I took a few months after moving here. At the time, the Subaru Telescope was the only one on the summit of Mauna Kea that offered tours to the general public, though the tours have been shut down by the current Covid situation.
I particularly remember the fabulous views from the walkway around the exterior of the telescope. The interior of the telescope was also interesting, though in the abstract way of a giant piece of equipment. This is not a telescope where one gets to put an eye to the lens to see what’s going on, though I was charmed to learn that when Princess Sayako of Japan dedicated the telescope in 1999, she was able to do just that because a special eyepiece had been constructed for that purpose!
The Subaru Telescope is a Ritchey-Chretien reflecting telescope. It has a large field of view which makes it ideal for wide-field sky surveys. For more information about the Subaru Telescope, visit https://subarutelescope.org/en/. The telescope’s live camera stream captured a cool video of last month’s Perseid Meteor Shower which can be seen here.
This view of Mauna Kea is interesting for a couple of reasons, neither of which have to do with Mauna Kea itself.
The first is that it shows the dry side of Waimea, which is to say some of the western part of the town. The dry side gets considerably less rain and more blue skies than the wet side though the separation is only a few miles.
The second point of interest is that this view looks nothing like this today. The area between the dark line of trees and the base of the clouds is where the recent brushfire went through. So it’s not currently green and pastoral. It’s more black and brown and apocalyptic.
The good news is the land will recover, assuming there are no more fires for a while.
Graham's Island 