Couple of nice shots from the summit

[opihikao]

Fantastic! Thank you, Mr. Tom.

[pahoated]

Nothing like Hawaiian nights. It is so cool the Milky Way looks like it's standing on end. That and we can see into the galaxy's center and there is a black hole at the center driving this engine.

"We come in peace!" - First thing said by missionaries and extraterrestrials

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Seeing the Milky Way can provide some perspective for how small our world is within the galaxy.
I just watched a video about The Laniakea supercluster of galaxies, a map of our corner of the universe, where the Milky Way itself is but a small dot in the supercluster network.

Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space. Redrawing the boundaries of the cosmic map, they redefine our home supercluster and name it Laniakea, which means ‘immeasurable heaven’ in Hawaiian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo

[TomK]

HOTPE - thanks for the link regarding Laniakea. This is a really nice discovery. For decades astronomers have wondered about the "Great Attractor" and why our local group of galaxies is heading towards it, but now it seems it's the centre of a galaxy super-cluster with us in the suburb regions. Brent Tully (UH IfA) is a big player in the field of local galaxies and cosmology. There is a video about the discovery on Brent's homepage (http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~tully/) but it may be a little too technical for the layperson.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Tom -
Thanks for posting Brent Tully's video. It's a good complement to the more layman friendly Nature Magazine video.
The 3-D rendering of Laniakea in both videos is pretty impressive. It's difficult to wrap your mind around a concept so huge, but the rotational view of the supercluster really helps to visualize it. A little bit anyway. From this hot rock on the pale blue dot.

[Peter Epperson]

Wow, I watched the video and I was left in the dust early on. I had to agree with the narrator, "The complexity of what we are seeing is overwhelming"
Puna seems so much smaller!

[TomK]

Peter - I fully understand where you are coming from! It's a bit like an ant trying to understand the layout of a city, its population distribution and its traffic flow...

[TomK]

Andrew Cooper, an engineer at the Keck, posted a really nice panorama of the summit at night on his blog the other day. For those who haven't seen it, the link is http://darkerview.com/wordpress/?p=14155 and you can click on the image there for a much larger view.