Lisa Perez-Gonzalez

Outreach and Observing at Mauna Loa in Hawaii

kolinski — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 16:18:52 +0000

Outreach and Observing at Mauna Loa in Hawaii kolinski Fri, 12/17/2021 - 09:18

Author:

kolinski

Dec 17, 2021

The domes of Mauna Loa Solar Observatory under rare cloudy skies (photo by Michael Thompson, NCAR Deputy Director, Mesa Lab, Boulder, CO).

Educational outreach is an important and rewarding part of an observer’s job at the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) site located on the flanks of Mauna Loa Mountain at an elevation of 3440 meters in the U.S. state of Hawai’i. MLSO is operated by the High Altitude Observatory (HAO), a division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is located in Boulder, Colorado.

Allen Stueben, (center), giving tour to14 high school students from Namiki High school in Japan.

The MLSO staff gives tours to mountain visitors a couple times a month. These groups of visitors range from colleges in the solar to atmospheric sciences, members of the public and school groups. This year's highlights included 14 high school students from Namiki High school in Japan, HAO/NCAR directors, and a tour of about 30 people from the International Astronomy Teaching Summit conference that happened in Hilo this past summer.

MLSO staff also participate in various community outreach events organized by the local astronomy community. These events typically attract a few hundred visitors and give MLSO a chance to share recent activity at the observatory as well as explain solar phenomena. During the 2018 Astroday West Hawaii event, MLSO made the front page of the local paper with the display featured in the linked article and depicted in the photograph "Lisa Waters" below. (http://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2017/11/06/hawaii-news/astro-day-lifts-off/). This years Astroday focused on magnetic fields and effects on the sun (right up our alley). One of our hands on activities had kids try to find magnets hidden behind sun-spots with little compasses.

Ben Berkey (bearded, lower right) giving tour to 30 people from the International Astronomy Teaching Summit conference.

HAO employs two full-time observers (Ben Berkey and Allen Steuben), one 3/4 time (Lisa Waters), and one casual observer (Greg Rose) on the mountain. Working at high altitude is challenging and the road to the summit, called Mauna Loa Scenic Drive or Mauna Loa Observatory Road, is a roughly paved and narrow 17-mile drive that climbs at an average 4.98% grade. For most, the drive is a once in a life time trip, but for our intrepid MLSO team it is a weekly commute.

As Ben Berkey likes to say "the days are long but far between." He describes a day that begins at sea level (Hilo on the east coast) and well before sunrise. Then, in a race against time, he travels upward along a treacherous road gaining thousands of meters in elevation. With luck, over an hour into the drive, he will emerge above cloud level into a clear sky; the world begins to brighten. At this point it is still a half an hour of travel and additional thousands of meters to gain while winding through a stark landscape of barren mounds of a'a or lava. Upon arriving at the observatory "temple", devoted to the study and tracking of the sun, it is a sudden flurry of activity to begin the day's tasks. Sleeping computers must be awakened and inspected to ensure their readiness for the work to come. In preparation, the great record-keeping tome must be opened to a fresh blank page. Next, ascending the telescope steps to inspect and clean the instrument, and finally the sun has emerged from the mountain and the great dome doors can be opened; let there be light! With great effort and much precision push and pull of the instruments, the tracking of the sun's progress begins. Now it's time to watch and wait. Clouds and moisture can be an issue and then the dome has to be closed and the daily observation mission aborted. If this were to happen there is always plenty more to do...caring for instrumentation is one of many top priorities, –lubricating moving parts, changing codes, and doing general building maintenance is required too.

Lisa Waters demonstrating magnetic fields and effects on the sun at the local astronomy community event, Astroday in West Hawaii.

All these daily labors of love are done by this sparse crew and they work mostly alone. They welcome the rare occasions when visitors arrive for educational tours and they have the opportunity to share the facility, equipment, and the solar science. On some occasions, when big equipment and/or heavy parts must be managed, then contractors are hired (MLSO installed a new dome in January 2016). As day light fades, the instrumentation is parked and the great doors, if still open, are now closed for the night. Ben returns to the sea by the same lonely road, saluting the sun as it falls below the horizon. It requires a unique and dedicated individual to handle the unusual working conditions at MLSO, an individual that can tolerate the extreme quite of this solitary and remote area, and a person that can accept the constantly changing and extreme weather conditions of a ruggedly high-altitude office location, but our team, the unsung heroes of Mauna Loa, seem to thrive.

Facts and figures:
3.5 hours driving, 10 hours on site.
Ben Berkey (Hilo, HI) and Allen Stueben (Kona, HI) are full time. Lisa Waters is 3/4 time. Greg is a casual.
Work schedule:
Ben works Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Allen works Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
Lisa works as a floater, nominally every other Sunday with 3 other days of overlap with either Allen or Ben during a 2 week period.
Greg works ever other Sunday.

The road to Mauna Loa Observatory.

A note from Ben: The altitude tends to make things take a little longer than normal. People think slower and physical exertion is harder. We have a ~500 foot walk up the hill (~30 foot elevation gain) from the parking lot which often makes me feel a bit out of shape especially if I am jogging. Jogging might be required if some clouds roll in while I am at the restroom down by the parking lot and I need to hustle up to the observatory to close the dome or otherwise react.

Written by Ben Berkey and Wendy Hawkins.

MLSO Honors the Sun at AstroDay West

kolinski — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 16:00:47 +0000

MLSO Honors the Sun at AstroDay West kolinski Fri, 12/17/2021 - 09:00

Author:

kolinski

Dec 17, 2021

On October 6th, the MLSO staff participated in AstroDay 2018, an educational outreach event coordinated by the Mauna Kea Observatories. 3,000 people attended. This was the second occurrence of this event, located in Kailua-Kona, on the west side of Hawaii Island. It featured booths and science displays from various local observatories, robotics clubs from numerous schools, and other tech-savvy groups.

Child safely viewing the sun through optical telescope.

Last year, MLSO had a booth featuring magnets, to demonstrate how magnetic fields dominate physical processes on the Sun, and explaining the observing instruments used to detect these solar magnetic fields. Our experience in 2017 was very positive, and our observer, Lisa Waters, was featured in the local paper.

So it was with excitement and anticipation that we approached this second event, AstroDay 2018. We settled on a theme of “the sun in many wavelengths.” We showed how direct observations of the Sun using solar telescopes compares with other types of observations, including polarized images, and ultraviolet images and movies made using instruments on orbiting satellites.

University student explaining the radio telescope experiment.

This year we teamed with college students from the University of Hawaii Astrophysics club. MLSO staff handled the movies and ultraviolet images, while the university students assisted the public with the use of the telescopes and explained what they were viewing. With the students, we built a radio telescope based on the “itty bitty radio telescope” project. The concept was to use a common device that is widely known to be associated with satellites and communication (a radio telescope) and show how the Sun also emits waves at radio wavelengths. A simple sensor produced an audio tone of different frequencies when a signal was detected. Children moved the dish back and forth until they could find the sun. For the more ambitious kids, we also had them try to find Jupiter, which was much harder during the daytime. Unfortunately, we had absolutely zero sunspots on AstroDay 2018 and only a few small prominences, but the university students helped everyone interested in seeing other solar phenomena.

Lisa Waters demonstrating UV beads.

In the MLSO booth, we tried to reinforce what people saw in the telescopes with a photosphere intensity demonstration and H-alpha movies. We demonstrated that even though the visible disk of the sun appears uneventful when viewing, the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite and movies from the MLSO coronagraph capture some interesting processes in the solar corona. This lead to further discussion of how these processes lead to changes in the solar wind and geomagnetic storms on earth. For the younger booth visitors, we helped them make bracelets out of UV sensitive beads that changed color in the sunlight to explain how there is some light from the sun that we can’t see with our eyes, but still affect things here on earth.

Overall it was a fun and successful day of public outreach for MLSO. It was wonderful collaborating with the university students at building a solar/radio wavelength exhibit that was a useful and engaging learning tool for the public. MLSO looks forward to more Astroday events and other public outreach opportunities and collaborations in the near future.

Ben Berkey and MLSO coronagraph images.

Lisa Perez-Gonzalez

Outreach and Observing at Mauna Loa in Hawaii

Recent News

Influence of the Stratospheric Quasi-Biennial Oscillation on the Seasonal Variation in the Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere Based on a Long-Term Reanalysis JAWARA

Quantifying the Impact of Solar Irradiance Uncertainty on Thermosphere-Ionosphere Variability Using Ensemble Forecasts

Polarization fringes in optical systems: a compendium

Contribution of Gravity Waves to the Lower Thermospheric Winter-to-summer Meridional Circulation in High-resolution WACCM-X

Spectropolarimetric Inversion in Four Dimensions with Deep Learning (SPIn4D): II. A Physics-Informed Machine Learning Method for 3D Solar Photosphere Reconstruction

NASA selects NSF NCAR Heliophysics Mission for Continued Development

New AI Based Methods for 3D Reconstruction of the Solar Photosphere

MHD simulations of CME with associated prominence eruption

Local Time Variability of Gravity Wave Activity Revealed by SABER Temperature Observations

Efficiency of Electromagnetic Energy Transfer from Solar Wind to Ionosphere through Magnetospheric Ultra-Low Frequency Waves