Hawaii - Part 5

Strange Plants and New Stars!

I was pleasantly surprised by the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden north of Hilo! It turned out to be one of the best attractions of our entire trip! We first descended on a scenic walkway carrying us to an unfamiliar tropical world.

Not far along this magical walkway we came upon the first of many botanical wonders, the Pink Quill:

Did this plant come from the jungle of an extraterrestrial planet? It looks like something from the movie, Avatar! But this was just the first of the strange alien plants. (Alien to us, of course! They must be normal in the tropics!) Check out these other alien specimens:

Care to climb this tree?

A dinosaur head could emerge between leaves at any point here.

Some really big leaves!

There was no end to the alien plants.

Is this a snake, or a plant?

And what in the world is this?

Long before arriving in Hawaii I eagerly anticipated seeing southern parts of the night sky not visible from my Virginia home. Lynchburg's latitude is about 37.4 degrees north. Our vacation house was located at about 19.4 degrees north. This 18-degree difference meant 18 degrees of southern sky below the horizon in Lynchburg was above the horizon in Hawaii!

It's rare to find a night with no clouds, no bright Moon, no street lights, no parking lot lights, no car headlights, no porch lights, no smoke, and no obscuring objects on the horizon. Normally, at home in Virginia, the odds are enormously against me. At our house in Hawaii, however, conditions were relatively good. Roughly half the sky was over the ocean where not a single light was present, and the ocean horizon was, of course, completely flat and unobscured. Much to my delight I discovered no streetlights visible from the house and almost no night traffic either! But astronomical good fortune only goes so far. Clouds were a big problem. Almost every night, every few hours, I would check to see if clouds had cleared, and almost every night would bring disappointment. There were brief episodes of clarity and patches of clear sky, but these were fleeting and relatively rare. Finally, near the very end of our stay, in the hours before dawn, the sky cleared. It was magnificently dark with stars visible all the way down to the horizon. I turned off all the house lights and climbed out onto the 4th floor roof with Keegan's binoculars. Strange southern constellations appeared. I saw Centaurus, Lupus, Vela, and Puppis. I also saw Crux, the Southern Cross, very low on the horizon! I was thrilled to finally see the Southern Cross! The picture below shows the view I had towards the southern horizon. (Click on the picture for full detail.)

The southern horizon in the picture above is relatively flat. It would have been wonderful to have such a flat southern horizon from my viewing position, but that would have been too much luck for this poor boy. My southern horizon, unfortunately, was on land. On my horizon, just to the right of the Southern Cross, a group of tall trees blocked the view. The stars on the right side of the Southern Cross were almost blocked by the trees. They winked in and out of view as breezes blew the tree limbs.

A daytime view of my southern horizon. Notice the unfortunate tall trees on the right. The house with the glaring interior light is located up on the hill to the left of the trees.

To the left of the annoying trees stood a house. Although all other neighborhood houses were completely dark at 5:00 am, wouldn't you know this one particular house, the one crucially located near things I wanted to see, THIS house had a glaring light inside shining directly in my eyes! Such is my luck when observing.

In spite of these annoying obstacles I was able to see some amazing things with binoculars. The easiest object was the giant globular cluster, Omega Centauri. This was visible to the naked eye as a small patch of dim light. In binoculars it looked something like this:

Omega Centauri has almost twice the apparent diameter of M13, the biggest globular cluster seen from Virginia. M13 is spectacular in a telescope. Omega Centauri must be twice as spectacular! I wished I had a telescope at hand! Next, not far to the upper left of Omega Centauri, I spotted galaxy Centaurus A, which appeared in binoculars as a dim, but clearly visible, hazy spot. Centaurus A looks like this in a telescope:

In the star chart above you notice the dim light of the Milky Way running low parallel to the horizon. I could see some of this glow near the blasted blocking trees. I believe I also saw the glow of the Eta Carinae Nebula, but only in brief glimpses between the trees. While scanning the Milky Way with binoculars I came upon NGC 3532, The Wishing Well Cluster. It looked like this with a memorable orange star on the left:

Hawaiian observing only made me want to see more southern objects and view them with a telescope instead of binoculars. Maybe someday I'll get to the Atacama Desert in Chile where I can view the southern sky under ideal conditions.

The Hawaii blog will finish next week with a farewell post.