Here is a Landsat image of Maui, courtesy of NASA. The island is formed by two shield volcanoes and is roughly 48 miles in length and 26 miles wide. I've tried to locate: 1-Kahului Airport, 2-Makena, and 3-Haleakala observatories. Click to enlarge the image.
Our first full day on Maui is Wednesday, January 13. I woke up to the sound of birds; hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them. The hotel courtyard is filled with the sound of Indian Myna birds--quite a racket. So much of the wildlife on the islands is non-native, it is not unusual to describe a species by where it was introduced from. On my way to breakfast (the Eggs Benedict is a specialty here) I saw this Black Crowned Heron waiting for its breakfast by a pool in the courtyard.
Here is the view from my room. The view, to the northwest, is of Mount Kahalawai, the other volcano that makes up the island of Maui.
The main event for the day is a tour up the slopes of Mount Haleakala (ha lā a ka la), Maui's famous volcano. On the bus on the way up a guide tells about local plants and animals. The Hawaiian Islands formed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean more than 2000 miles from the nearest land masses. Any native plants, birds, or insects that arrived here were blown here by storms. The only mammal is the Hawaiian Hoary Bat. More recently many species have been introduced, intentionally and unintentionally, by people.
There are telescopes at the top of the volcano (10,023 feet). The curious cylindrical building houses a secret Air Force telescope (the telescope with the fastest slew rate on the planet) that is used to observe Russian satellites (during daylight when they are illuminated by the sun) as they pass overhead.
We are told, we are at 10,000 feet, walk slowly, take the sloping pathway, not the steps. It is cold. It is windy, with gusts to 30 or 50 miles per hour. In some areas we see dormant lava flows. In some we see cinder cones.
We are told to be careful where we step. Do not step anywhere near the endemic (only found in Hawaii) silversword plants; they have very shallow root systems. (This picture is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain. Any picture for which no attribution is given is one that I have taken.)
In places the ground around us looks like the surface of Mars.
On the way day down we stopped in Hosmer Grove. The trees were planted around 1910 as an experiment to see what non-native plants would grow locally. Some, possibly for timber. Our naturalist took us on a walk and pointed out various birds. We saw an Apapnie, an Iiwi, and a Pacific Golden Plover. This was followed by a picnic lunch.
At 5:00 pm we had a lecture and group meeting. Michael Shara gave the first of several lectures. Astrophysics 101 covered introductory material. He went on to explain that after Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in 1994 scientists were forced to seriously consider that a comet or meteorite might hit the Earth. Up to that point many scientists believed that most large space debris had either fallen into the Sun or been vacuumed up by Jupiter. Tomorrow we would visit the Pan-STARRS telescope which was built to look for objects that are on a collision course with Earth.
And then dinner with my friends.
