Wednesday, May 25, 2011

My Hawaiian research cruise: Big Island

The second day of our cruise brought us through the Alenuihaha channel between the Big Island (aka Hawai'i) and Maui. I think this is the Big Island, but there's a chance it might be Maui. It's at sunset.


Much of the time we were pretty far from land (see above photo), so I didn't get that many good photos of the Big Island, either.

That night, we could see about seven specks of lava spotting the coastline in the distance. It was nothing compared to what I saw on the Big Island last August, but it was still nice.


The Big Island is the newest Hawaiian island, and the one with still very active volcanoes. A month after our cruise, the activity went up considerably. Shame we missed that.

The most frustrating part was that we couldn't take good photos with long exposures because the ship was moving, so they'd just come out blurry. Here, you can kind of make out a plume of smoke illuminated red by glowing lava beneath it. There were several of these we saw on the crest of the land.


The morning was more scenic. Here's a little rain at sunrise on the coast of the Big Island.


I loved how some of the splotches of black hardened lava flows looked like someone had taken a big bucket of black paint and tossed it on the green hillside. The light wasn't very good for my photos, but you might be able to see better if you click on this one to zoom in.


I promise that my photos of Moloka'i tomorrow will be much more spectacular.

2 comments:

Sebastian Anthony said...

re: the night-time photos -- you might want to shoot it as video, and then extract single frames from the video. They will probably be very noisy, but you might be able to make out more details. Assuming the video mode actually shows something and isn't just pitch black :)

Eleni said...

Oh, that's a good idea. I recall discovering that once years ago with my old camera and a flaming figgy pudding, but I didn't think to try it here.