Hawaii - day 3

Monday, Dec 13: Here's the view from our hotel:

Breakfast at McDonalds, again.

This time we tried the Hawaiian breakfast platter. They also have a Huapia pie. Getting sick of McDonald's.

In the morning, we went to Rainbow Falls park.

At the top of the falls is a series of calm pools.

Very pretty, but full of mosquitoes. I got bitten several times. SC's mom recommends vitamin B1 (and lots of it; approx 30x RDA).

Along the path to the top of the falls is a huge banyan tree. A guy nearby said that it's about a hundred years old.

Wikipedia says they start as epiphytes growing on a host tree, eventually killing the host by covering it with its root structures. This one has already expanded out in a ring around itself.

From Rainbow Falls, we headed to the Mauna Loa's macadamia factory. These are plants I saw along the way:

The actual factory wasn't particularly interesting. The self-guided tour consisted of peering in through factory windows. And it's not exactly like Willy Wonka in there.

They did have a pretty garden, though:

Next, we headed towards the Kalapana lava viewing area. However, we had to wait because it doesn't open until 2pm. So we stopped at Lava Tree State Park.

This is the first time I've seen feral chickens! I still find them to be a somewhat strange phenomenon: chickens are not the sort of animal I'd expect to survive in the wild.

This forest was also the first we'd seen with such canopy trees:

Here (below) are the eponymous lava trees. We never found out exactly how they're formed, but it has something to do with the interaction between lava and trees.

This park was also home to a variety of other interesting flora:

From there, we headed to the lava viewing area. The vast expanses of black lava rock is a pretty amazing sight:

This (above) is from a fairly recent (Nov 24) lava flow. If you look west across it, you can see heat rising from the lava rock. We decided that isn't purely solar heating; the lava must still be warm from volcanic activity.

These plants are starting to colonize older flows. From the looks of it, though, they don't get very far before new lava comes along and kill everything off again.

People are also living here! All the lava you see is private property. The land isn't particularly cheap, either -- we talked to the security guards at the entrance (they're there to prevent tourists from parking on private property) and they told us how much the houses are selling for.

From Kalapana, we headed to the tide pools at Kapoho beach. There weren't many people there; you have to drive through a residential community to get there, and the beach itself belongs to the community, I think.

I am very fond of these plants. From a distance, they look like succulents, but they're actually folded leaves:

The Internet tells me that they're beach naupaka. Native to Hawaii, but an invasive species to Florida.

There were so many animals living in the tide pools! These snails are everywhere:

We also saw crabs, but they quickly scurry into crevices when they see you coming.

Some pools contained corals:

Given the fact that people wade in these pools, I'm surprised there are still so many corals. I guess the clear water helps people avoid them, and the sharp rocks are also a good deterrent.

In these areas with lots of corals, there is also a ton of fish! We spent a long time sitting by this pool, watching them. There are schools of catfish-like fish, fish that sit on rocks for long periods of time, fish chasing other fish, a few polka-dotted puffer-like fish, some butterflyfish, and many striped fish. If you pick a rock and just watch it, sooner or later a fish will swim out from under it. I'd seen aquariums like this, but I didn't think fish actually lived in such densities in the wild!

Here are some pictures of fishes:

Mouseover for identifications. I tried my best, using this site for reference. That's a pretty awesome site, by the way. Next time we go looking for fishes, we will consult their travels page for ideas.

Anyways, the Kopoho tide pools were pretty cool to see! It's given me a lot more context for aquarium setups. We watched fishes until sunset, then went searching for dinner.

We first consulted the GPS's restaurant directory, which sent us to a vacant building in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The iPhone was more helpful; we ended up eating at Sombat's Thai Cuisine. It had very high ratings on Yelp, but it really wasn't very impressive. Maybe San Jose has spoiled us...

Panorama stitching software

For the next set of Hawaii photos, I have two sets of panoramics that I wanted to stitch together. I'm on my travel laptop (Acer Aspire One D250) and using Picasa for photo managing. However, Picasa doesn't have a built-in panoramic stitching tool. So I looked around and tried some to compare:

The Contenders

Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor (ICE): Easy install and easy to use. Only one to offer automatic crop that actually works.

Hugin (GUI for panotools): It's on sourceforge, which is generally a good sign. However, to use the automatic control point detection, you have to separately install autopano-sift-C (and, as of 2010/12/26, it has to be version 2.5.1). There's some patent protection in place, however, and the site where I finally found a precompiled binary contained no less than 2 popups for Russian brides.

The Hugin GUI (2009.4.0) is not very easy to use, either. In order to get good results, I had to do some manual tweaking. Screenshots on their website suggest that the newer version (2010.2.0) is a bit sleeker.

Autostitch: I was impressed by the academic hostname, but the program isn't very polished. Download is just a zip file with a single executable, and the GUI is very plain. Everything is automatic, though.

Windows Live Photo Gallery: Easy install and easy to use, though it will try to take over photo management. Inconvenient resizing.

Results

Trees along HI-19 in Hilo

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Hugin

Autostitch

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Tide pools at Kapoho

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Hugin

Autostitch

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Discussion

Here are my ratings (5 = best):

Criterion	MS-ICE	Hugin	Autostitch	Windows Live
Ease of use	5	1	3	4
Invisibility of seams	1	3	5	4
Handling of subject motion between shots	5	5	2	5
Straightness of horizon	2	3	2	2
Exposure compensation	2	3	3	4

The Microsoft Image Composite Editor, although extremely easy and convenient to use, didn't perform very well. However, it might be more appropriate for easier stitching tasks, e.g. cases where everything in the image is "far away" (mitigating camera motion effects) and exposure is similar.

Hugin was just too difficult to set up and use, with little payoff.

Autostitch worked pretty well, and I think it handled the lines on the road best of all of them. That's probably due to aggressive blending, though, rather than good image alignment. This can be seen in the tree picture - look for the windblown palm and the pickup truck at the seam between the center and right photo.

So that leaves the Windows Live panorama stitcher as the best of the ones I tried. And honestly, I'm pretty satisfied with its results.

I've also heard good things about the Canon PhotoStitch software, so I'll have to dig out the CD that came with my digital camera and try it out.

Hawaii - day 2

Sunday, Dec 12: Breakfast at McDonalds. We saw tons of motorcycles and classic cars turned out for some kind of event; turns out it was the Rock and Roll Motorcycle Club's 15th annual Toys for Tots motorcade!

After breakfast, we went to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which was pretty awesome. Admission was $10/car and good for a week.

The rest of the crater rim drive was closed, but we could still drive up to Jaggar museum, which offered an overlook of the Kilauea caldera:

The caldera extends beyond the frame of this picture; the crater visible in the photo is Halema'uma'u crater, which vents a mixture of steam and sulfur dioxide.

Although the lava is not visible, at night (sorry, no pictures) it illuminates the steam plume with an incandescent glow.

Along the caldera rim, there are other vents:

Some of them are by the roadside and remind me of subway work in New York (sidenote: it turns out the steam in NYC is actually from Con Edison's steam system, the largest district heating system in the US!)

Others are more natural looking: gashes in the earth that effuse moisture, with a dramatic effect on nearby flora.

We hiked the Kilauea Iki trail, which goes along the edge of the Kilauea Iki crater and then down onto the floor of the former lava lake. Some of the railings along the way showed evidence (I think) of lava splatter:

The path along the crater rim is very jungle-y.

From the crater rim, there's a pretty good overview of the Kilauea Iki crater.

In 1959, it was a lava lake. On the side away from the lava fountain (shown above), it's quite smooth. You can see the path that's been worn in by tourists crossing the crater floor.

It's really quite big.

The cracked mound in the center of this picture is the ash cone created by the former lava fountain. It's a different color from the rest of the crater, and the material is more like loose sand than rock.

We followed the rim trail to the far side of the crater and came back across the crater floor, starting on the far side of the lava fountain. Here, the rock is more broken up.

Closer to the lava fountain, the rock formations get more severe, probably due to the backflow while solidifying.

In the cracks, some intrepid plants have taken hold and will eventually create a layer of organic material for future flora.

We found a lot of "Pele's Hair", long filaments of glassy rock that formed while cooling in mid-air. It bears an uncanny resemblance to dirty blonde hair.

As we move away from the lava fountain, the crater floor gets quite smooth, with a couple cracked mounds breaking the surface. Note the fabric-like folds in the solid rock!

These are constantly spewing steam, apparently from rainwater that has trickled down into contact with subterranean lava (or is it magma?).

Beyond these mounds, the crater floor is smooth. There is a network of cracks between gentle mounds, and over here there is white material around those cracks.

We couldn't decide if it was chemical precipitate from the vents that had settled into the cracks, or if it was some kind of lichen attracted to the moisture seeping from the cracks.

As we got farther away, some of these cracks revealed ferns and other plants growing underneath!

The plants we saw also started getting bigger and healthier-looking:

However, the edge of the crater still showed a marked transition from (mostly) barren lava rock to dense forest.

Our last stop in Volcanoes National Park was the Thurston lava tube:

I personally didn't find it all that exciting, though the geology of its formation is kinda neat: it started as a lava flow in a trench; then the top surface cooled and solidified, leaving a tube of lava flowing in the core. Finally, that flow began to subside, no longer filling the tube, until it finally stopped, leaving a flat floor to the tube.

So the tube is exactly that: a round tube of fairly consistent diameter with a flat floor. Rather like a pedestrian underpass, but without the hobos.

For dinner, we went to the Seaside Restaurant and Aqua Farm in Hilo. They have fenced-in pools of fish:

There's also a ton of white birds that come to roost in the trees around this lake. I wish I had a better picture -- it's quite a sight.

For dinner, we finally got our ahi poke:

And giant slabs of prime rib.

It was very good, but in retrospect, maybe we should have tried the fish, it being an aqua farm and all...