Wow! It is already Tuesday, January 19. The agenda for the day is lecture in the morning and whale watching cruise in the afternoon. Above, another beautiful sunset in Kona, Hawaii.
A Window into Science was the title of today's lecture. First, we heard about the analemma. If you take a picture of the sun in the sky from the same place at the same time every day (or every some number of days) for a year, the Sun traces out a curve that looks something like a figure eight. That curve is an analemma.
We learned about extra-terrestrial life and exoplanets, planets that circle stars other than our Sun. One strong argument that aliens have never visited planet Earth is that there are no souvenirs; no objects whose construction is beyond our technologies. Places to look for life in our Solar System would be Mars, Europa, and Titan. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has an icy surface and possibly liquid water beneath the surface. Titan, a moon of Saturn, is made mostly of water ice and rocky material with hydrocarbon lakes. Michael Shara referred to the Hubble Space Telescope as "my favorite discovery machine."
After lunch we went on a two and one half hour whale watching cruise. Here is a picture of our boat. There was a naturalist on board who explained what we were seeing. Over the island we could see patches of vog; a combination of the words volcano and fog; a fog with sulphur dioxide. We saw tent-like objects on the water. They were used for farming fish for local restaurants. We saw humpback whales. These humpback whales spend the summer off Alaska and come to Hawaii in the winter to have their calves. There are two kinds of whales. Those with baleen which are sort of like combs that they use to filter their food (krill and small fish) from a mouthful of water. And those with teeth. The baleen whales are the less social. If one encounters danger and vocalizes, other whales were get the message and flee. The toothed whales are more social. If one encounters danger, for example, it has beached itself, the others will go to its aid and end up beaching themselves. The humpbacks we were seeing were baleen whales.
Perhaps the most spectacular thing on the whale watch happened as we were returning to Kona. Approaching the boat from the front was a pod of spinner dolphins. They jumped out of the water and spun around their long axis before landing back in the water. This picture is from Wikipedia and is courtesy of Wild Side Specialty Tours.
Near the dock was this sign marking the start and the end of the Ironman Hawaii competition. The Triathlon involves swimming 2.4 miles, then bicycling 112 miles, and then running a 26.2 mile marathon. The very first competition was run in Honolulu in 1978 by some runners (who thought runners were the best athletes) and some swimmers (who though swimmers were the best athletes) after reading an article in Sports Illustrated about a bicyclist who had the greatest oxygen update ever measured. The event was moved to Kona in 1982. The place where the event starts is just some sand and some rocks; not a very impressive beach. It was right next to the pier where we boarded the boat.
Another wonderful dinner at the hotel. And tomorrow another volcano.
