The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

Watching a moonbow with your own eyes is an awesome experience. While the camera can capture colors that the eye doesn’t see (as explained in my previous blog post about moonbows), the way it works doesn’t capture the experience that well. A long moonlit exposure looks almost the same as a daylight exposure that one would be able to make with a strong neutral density filter. The image differs substantially only by the presence of stars in the sky, however on a full moon night, only the brightest stars are visible.

For this reason, I have found moonbows to be one of the subjects where a time-lapse movie is more compelling than a still image. The motion of the stars gives them a presence beyond sparse pinpoints. The displacement of the rainbow as the moon moves across the sky adds interest.

While with some effort it is sometimes possible to deal with the spray while making still images, in time-lapse photography one needs to take pictures continuously, for extended periods of time. This means no stopping even when spray is coming at you, and no downtime to wipe the lens. Under those circumstances, unless you can photograph from above the spray (as at Cascade Falls), the only way to get clear images is to use a rain deflector.

The rain deflector is not a piece of equipment you hear about in photography circles. It works by spinning a clear piece of glass in front of the lens at a high velocity (3000 rotations per minute). This creates a centrifugal effect and a vacuum effect which throws water out of the glass. It’s quite tricky to make because you want high velocity rotation, but you don’t want any vibration. There is only one commercially available spinning rain deflector, the Israel-made Spintec, imported in the US by InnoVision Optics, a company which sells highly specialized equipment to the movie industry. Not many units are sold, so they charge quite a premium for it – even a simple power cable costs $140.

After buying the deflector for $1725, you need to accessorize it, which isn’t as obvious as it seems. While one can mount it like a filter, I was wary of loading a lens with a relatively heavy accessory this way. Unless one uses a lens with a tripod mount, the weight would also be poorly distributed, certainly a potential source of vibration with long exposures. In addition, Steve Bumgardner (watch his behind the scenes video for “moonbows”) warned me that the filter mount can easily go out of alignment, causing a contact between the spinning glass and the lens. At 3000 RPM, this would instantly scratch the glass (a $300 custom Tiffen filter). Following his recommendations, I ended up mounting it using a movie-standard 15mm rod system based on the JAG35 baseplate. I replaced the stock rods with a pair of longer and lighter 9″ carbon fiber rods from Redrock Micro. Since all my cameras have quick-release plates, I added a B2 LLR II quick release clamp from Really Right Stuff. That clamp may look overkill, but I chose it because of its additional holes which I use to make sure that the assembly does not rotate out of alignment.

The deflector requires a 12V battery – a standard in the movie world – which isn’t included. You can buy ready-to-use cables for a variety of video batteries. Instead, I modified the power cable with stripped leads that comes standard. I attached it to a barrel jack (2.1mm x 5.5mm) compatible with two different batteries which serve other purposes as well. The Powerstream Universal lithium ion battery pack PST-MP3500 (also Tekkeon MP3450) offers 45WH, which is enough to run the rain deflector all night. In addition, its built-in multi-voltage capability means that I can also use it to power my cameras (the 5D2 and 5D3 require 7.5V) as well as other electronic devices. The battery sold by Dynamic Perception to power their Stage Zero dolly has a capability of 32WH, but being only a 12V battery, it is lighter (200g v 440g) and smaller.

Last, a rain cover is needed. For daytime use, it needs to be black, in order to block light from reflecting from the back of the filter. Its front opening has to be large enough to fit the rain deflector. Not too many rain covers satisfy both requirements. The Vortex Media Pro SLR Storm Jacket (medium size) worked for me.

I usually use the 16-35/2.8 lens with the rain deflector. By placing the front just a few millimeters away from the spinning glass, it is possible to zoom to 16mm without vignetting, although because of the mount flex I feel more comfortable with a bit more of a margin. The deflector itself weights about 750g. Mounting system and power add another 750g (using the lighter battery). The entire assembly remains light and small enough to be turned side ways (for verticals) and even used hand-held. I think that besides moonbows, it gives me the capability to work in a broad range of weather situations.

Besides producing a movie, using a time-lapse set-up is a convenient way to capture still images of variable phenomena. The first image below was created for a time-lapse. It was shot at 3am, so I was glad I didn’t have to be standing there all night in the cold. Instead, I could pick the best frame from the hundreds captured. The drawback is that for a time-lapse movie, you often want to frame wider in order to have latitude for moves, so you’d crop for the still image. For the second image, I didn’t really mean to produce a time-lapse movie. I was planning to shoot stills that night, but I just got too cold to hang around, so I set-up a time-lapse and went down to try to warm up. Both spots where the camera was placed were so wet that it would have been difficult even to take a still image without the rain deflector. The more mist, the better the rainbow, though ! Please let me know if you prefer original or cropped versions:

Original image for time-lapse movie

Cropped still image

Original image

Cropped still image

(click here if you don’t see link to vote)

A moonbow is a rainbow produced by moonlight, rather than direct sunlight. While observing a rainbow in the sky requires rare and unpredictable combination of conditions, it isn’t too difficult to predict the appearance of spray moonbows, which occur in the mist of waterfalls.

Yosemite moonbows have been known for some time. John Muir described the experience of seeing them. They’ve been photographed for at least 3 decades, but it’s only recently that they became a popular subject. Normally the light is too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes, so they appear to the eye as a silvery arc. The camera has no trouble to capture the colors with a long exposure. However, during last May’s “supermoon” – which is the brightest one will see during our lifetime -, the light was bright enough to see the colors directly.

The moonbow is brightest on the night of a full moon, with the two days before and after the full moon also usable, making it a five day window per month when the water is flowing enough to produce mist. In Yosemite, this is usually April, May, and June, so this week-end will be your last chance for the year, even though this year it might not be great since the flow is already low due to small snowpack. Once you know when the moonbow rises on a given day, it is an easy matter to predict its timing for the other days: a moonbow will appear 50 minutes later each day from the same spot.

Any waterfall with a significant amount of mist front lit by the moon can produce a rainbow, but the easiest viewing is provided by Yosemite Falls. There are two classic locations for which Don Olson posts predictions, Lower Yosemite Fall seen from the bridge at its base, and Upper Yosemite Fall seen from Cook’s Meadow. Don’s predictions are for the base of the falls, where the mist is normally the thickest, but rainbows can appear higher at earlier times.

In recent years, the two “classic” locations have become extremely popular. On the week-end of May 5, 2012, there were hundreds of photographers at each location, and constant road traffic until mid-night, so expect a very “social” experience there ! While the meadow has plenty of room for people to spread out, the bridge is fairly cramped.

I avoided the crowds by moving to a spot much closer to Lower Fall, right against the cliff, which I had rediscovered (I’d seen it before in photos made by Carlton Watkins in the 19th century) in this great episode of Yosemite Nature Notes – a must-watch if you have any interest in Yosemite Moonbows. I like this view better than the classical one from the bridge because you get a glimpse of Upper Yosemite Fall in alignment. Needless to say, at that close range it was wet. Since the water comes from snowmelt, it was cold. The first night I made the mistake of wearing breathable-waterproof fabric. My top was the Alpinist jacket, the flagship Goretex shell from highly regarded Marmot and my bottom the PreCip pants, which although lighter, is still advertised as a waterproof rain pant. Soaked to the bone, exposed to the full force of the spray, I barely escaped hypothermia. Those fabrics are just not waterproof if constantly hit by water with any significant velocity. On subsequent nights, I wore rubber-coated fabrics, which despite partly suffering from de-lamination, actually kept me more dry.

On the night of Saturday, which I anticipated would be the most popular, I spent the night on the Yosemite Falls trail, away from the valley, to capture the moonbow on Upper Yosemite Fall and the iconic Half-Dome in the background. I was going to try a higher spot (see daytime view), but in the evening there was almost no wind. The upper part of the waterfall would have no mist and therefore no rainbow, so I set up at a slightly lower spot. It turned out that the wind picked up during the night, but I chose not to disturb the set-up for reasons which will be clear in the next post. The view isn’t as open, however, being closer to to the mist gave a double rainbow.

Using another set of cameras and tripod, I also photographed from the point where the trail turns the corner and you see Upper Yosemite Falls for the first time. Despite the very late hour – it was midnight, I was surprised to see quite a few folks up there, despite the 2 hour hike from the valley floor. It is well worth it, as Upper Yosemite Fall being so much taller than Lower Yosemite Fall, and plunging into an open bowl, produces a much more spectacular rainbow, which is much more impressive from here than from the distant meadow.

For those who’d like to try it yourself, here is some technical information.

• Gear You will need a camera capable of long exposures (a full-frame DSLR provides the best image quality) and a tripod, as the light is fairly faint. A way to lock the shutter for bulb exposures can be very useful. Even if you don’t shoot them wide-open, fast lenses will make it easier to see your composition.
• Exposure Light meters don’t work in such faint light, so you’ll have to use manual exposure. For a full moon, my basic is exposure is f/2.8, 30 seconds, ISO 640. With a locking cable release, you can try longer equivalent exposures either at lower ISO to minimize noise (such as f/2.8 45 seconds ISO 400, f/2.8 90 seconds ISO 200, f/2.8 3 minutes ISO 100) or at smaller apertures to improve lens resolution and depth of field (such as f/4 1 minute ISO 640, f/5.6 2 minutes ISO 640) or both. Don’t use too long of an exposure, though: above 5 minutes, some bands of color may merge together as the rainbow is moving during the exposure. With those exposure values, the image will look like a daytime shot – too bright to convey a night feeling, but you can darken it later, resulting in a less noisy image than one created directly with a night-like exposure. On the nights before and after full-moon, although it looks the same to the human eye, the light is actually significantly dimmer, so be sure to adjust exposure accordingly.
• Focus Autofocus doesn’t work in such faint light, and it is also quite difficult to focus manually. The best way to proceed is to focus the lens at infinity using the moon (or any other distant light source), and then tape your focus ring so that it doesn’t move. For instance I use my 24/1.4 lens almost exclusively for night photography, so I have tapped it semi-permanently with a wide patch of gaffer tape.
• Keeping the lens dry In many cases, you’ll be standing close to the rainbow-producing mist of the waterfall. The fine mist droplets do not ruin the images the same way as larger rain drops do, however they do add up. To get the clearest image, you’ll need to keep your lens dry. Bring plenty of lens tissue, and keep your lens cap on when not exposing. Remove it just before taking the picture. Once you feel the beginning of a breeze, which means more mist and a better rainbow, you’ll have a few seconds before the lens gets too wet. If you are standing very close to the mist – which yields the best rainbows – your lens will get wet instantly, so you’d need more sophisticated equipment that I’ll describe in the next post: using a rain deflector to photograph moonbows.

Good luck, and feel free to link to your own moonbow images !

View more Moonbow images

Winter lasts more than half of the year in Fairbanks. The snowpack is established by October and remains until May. From November to March, all the water is frozen solid.

Besides the fact that the month of March is the most favorable for photographing the Aurora in Alaska, another reason to visit Fairbanks at this time of the year is the ice carving competition called “Ice Alaska”, or formally “World Ice Art Championships”. If driving the Dalton Highway in winter is a bit more too adventurous, Ice Alaska, which takes place in Fairbanks, cannot be easier to attend.

The event takes place in a large open area, full of structures built of ice which form a family-friendly park. Kids – carted around by parents in sleds instead of strollers – climb animal-shaped sculptures and enjoy slides. There is also a building where you can buy some food and warm up for a while.

The main attraction for visitors, however, is the competition itself. Carving generally takes place around the first week of March, then prices are awarded and sculptures remain all the month. If you are there early in the month, you’ll see the teams working, whereas later in the month, you get to admire all the completed works.

I learned in the informational panels next to the sculptures that there is quite an international circuit for ice-carving artists. The most prestigious event of the circuit is the Fairbanks event. The Fairbanks ice is the best in the world for ice sculpture, because it is obtained from small pit ponds in which water is not subjected to currents (unlike rivers and lakes). This gives it a crystal clear purity since there are no bubbles or white streaks.

At night the character of the sculptures is dramatically improved by colored lights that help highlight the detail in three-dimensionality. An entrance ticket is valid for the whole day, so that it is easy to revisit in the evening if you arrived early. I suppose if you are lucky, you can see the Aurora dancing overhead, but we didn’t. (Low activity, 2).

The competition is divided into two categories, single-block and multi-block. The multi-block is certainly the most spectacular. 20 4-persons teams carve 12 blocks of ice measuring 4′ x 4′ x 3′. The resulting sculptures line up two sides of a large open area.

Multiblock lends itself to group of sculptures, but since ice artists can cut and piece ice in any way, so the resulting sculptures can be considerably larger than the block dimensions, such as this almost life-size locomotive. The sculptures are fenced, but you wouln’t want to stand beneath this one in any case !

The 2012 multiblock winner, “Prickly Reception” from Junichi Nakamura, Shinichi Sawamura, Satoru Mahoe and Takahiro Sueyosh, is a leopard stalking a crested porcupine carved with incredible intricacy.

In the single block competition, 40 2-person teams carve a single block of ice measuring 5′ x 8′ x 3′, and weighting nearly 8,000 pounds. The single-block sculptures were displayed in an easy-to miss wooded area next to the main space. The 2002 single-block winner is the mermaid sculpture “Treasure Hunt Blue Marine” from Junichi Nakamura and Victor Dagatan. I imagine that Victor Dagatan practices in a room-sized freezer (like another ice artist from Mexico to whom I talked) since he is from the Philippines.

If you enjoy cold weather, besides the Aurora, this unusual event is another good reason to visit Fairbanks in March. Here is the official Ice Alaska website. Be sure to bring a tripod for photographing the sculptures at night !

See more images of Fairbanks and Ice Alaska

Part 3 of 5: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

The Dalton Highway has the reputation of being one of the most dangerous roads in the world. It is one of the northernmost roads, crossing well into the Arctic, and reaching the highest road point in Alaska that is maintained throughout the year, Atigun Pass. Then there is the extreme remoteness. Along its 414 miles there are services only at one place in winter: Coldfoot (population 13). The 240 mile stretch north of Coldfoot is the longest in North America without services. The Dalton Highway was not designed for personal vehicles, but rather as an industrial road for trucks. It was built in 1974 to support the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and Trans-Alaska pipeline. For the first twenty years it was closed to public traffic. Those speeding 18 wheelers can add to the hazards of the road. In summer, gravel flies and windshield damage is likely.

In winter, temperatures become extreme, creating hazardous road conditions. The Wikitravel article on the Dalton Highway warns: “travel from late September through early May is frigid and lethally cold during the heart of winter. Temperatures below -40ºF (-40ºC) are very common and temperatures as low as -60ºF (-57ºC) are certainly possible–before factoring in windchill. The record low windchill in Deadhorse was -102ºF(-74ºC) on February 28, 1989! A chart record of windchill at ARCO’s facility in Prudhoe Bay on 1/13/1975 shows -128. Such temperatures are lethal in less than 1 minute if not prepared for such temperature. Unless experienced with polar temperatures and gear, DO NOT attempt to traverse the highway between November and March! “.

-32F temperature north of Atigun Pass on a sunny day

Why would someone want to drive the Dalton Highway ? It is the only road in the US (and one of only two in North America) which cross the Arctic Circle, providing access to unique landscapes of the far north. In winter, this is one of the best places in the continent for observing the northern lights. At these latitudes, the Aurora is high above you, illuminating the whole landscape, instead of being low on the horizon. In this post, I’ll detail my experience of driving the Dalton Highway in winter and provide some practical information.

Fairbanks is the place to rent a vehicle. A local company specializes in renting cars equipped for the Dalton Highway, however their vehicles were too small for sleeping two, so we rented a full size SUV at the airport. Because the temperatures in Fairbanks are more frigid than in Anchorage (further south and situated on the ocean), all rental cars are better winterized. Amongst other things, they are equipped with a block-engine warmer. This prevents your engine from freezing solid when the temperatures dip below -20F. When parking overnight in the city you connect the warmer to an electrical plug using an extension cord. Such plugs are commonly found in hotel parking lots, near park meters on the street, or even on the Denali National Park visitor center parking lot.

However, when in the wilderness, there are no electric plugs, so to keep the engine – and yourself – from freezing overnight, your only solution is to start your engine every few hours and let it run some. To do that, you’d need to carry extra gas. We were disappointed that our SUV did not have any roof bars that we could use to strap gas containers. Fumes makes it unhealthy to carry gas in the car, so this limited our options for staying overnight. In order to prevent fuel from freezing, we used an additive called “Heet”, which apparently is quite popular since it was sold out at the Fairbanks Wall-Mart.

Having read that the road surface is rough enough that two rim-mounted spare tires are recommended, I found it surprisingly smooth. Possibly that was the benefit of driving on ice. On the flipside, ice made the road pretty slick and we could feel that we were often only a small margin from loosing control of the car. Because of that, we tried to avoid driving in the state of exhaustion which would have resulted from staying up all night for the aurora. Although our SUV was equipped with what would be considered winter tires in California, an Alaskan told us that those were summer tires by his standards.

Cell phone coverage is not available along the Dalton Highway, but the SPOT satellite messenger worked. We also carried a CB radio to communicate with the truckers, but have not found it useful. Although it costs a bit for a heavy truck to stop and restart, in the far north people seem to look for each other. When we got stuck on a shoulder, the first truck who passed by rescued us. In normal conditions, there is enough truck traffic along the Dalton Highway that the wait wouldn’t be that long. However, severe weather or snow drifts could close the road for days in winter. We carried sleeping bags rated for -30F, as well as several days of non-perishable food, and two liquid-fuel stoves (butane/propane stove are useless in those temperatures). One of them quit working during the trip. Personal-size thermos allowed us to prepare hot food and drinks. Without them, they would get cold without a few minutes. Larger thermos bottles kept water from freezing. We bought in Fairbanks a spare battery (returned after the trip), shovel and tow rope – which turned out to be the most used emergency gear.

The Dalton Highway starts about 80 miles north of Fairbanks. In winter, the last gas station before Coldfoot is in Fox at junction of Eliott and Steese Highways just outside of Fairbanks. Until Coldfoot, the landscape is dominated by rolling hills of boreal forest. The first landmark is the long bridge across the 2000 mile-long Yukon River, which surprisingly features a wooden road surface (mile 56).

At mile 115, you cross the Arctic circle. This sign is found next to a pullout east of the highway.

The only services between Fox and Deadhorse are found in Coldfoot (mile 175), which has a truck stop with gas, a restaurant, and a payphone which can be used with a calling card. Their motel, the Slate Creek Inn is expensive and uninviting. The better choices for accommodations are in the historic community of Wiseman (mile 188): Arctic Getaway Bed and Breakfast (we stayed there: friendly owners, cozy cabin, reasonable rates, satellite internet during breakfast) and Boreal Lodge.

The most spectacular section is from Coldfoot to a few dozen miles north of Atigun Pass (mile 244), where the Dalton Highway crosses the Brooks Range. Since we could not carry enough gas to stay overnight north of Atigun Pass, we visited that section as a day out of Wiseman. We avoided driving the Atigun Pass at night as the pass is quite steep. It would have helped there to have better tires or chains. Further north, the landscape turns to flatter tundra terrain that we did not explore on that trip.

Thanks to good weather, our first drive up the Dalton Highway in winter turned out to be uneventful, however we came back with more respect for this harsh and inhospitable environment.

See more images of the Dalton Highway, images of Wiseman

Additional information

• Alaska Geographic visitor guide repository: has current 24-page BLM guide.
• Lonely Planet’s guide to the Dalton Highway
• Wikitravel guide to the Dalton Highway
• Winterscapes Of The Alaskan Arctic by Ben Hattenbach

Part 2 of 5: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Last winter, I traveled from March 12 to March 23 with my friend Regis Vincent to Alaska to seek the Aurora Borealis, also called Northern Lights. Since this was my first attempt, I sought to maximize chances of seeing the Aurora:

• Auroral activity is strongest slightly above the Polar Circle, which in North America is most easily accessed from Fairbanks, served by an international airport.
• Auroral activity follows a long-term cycle of about a dozen years, peaking in 2012-2013. Within the year, the peak usually takes place during the two equinoxes.
• March has generally much clearer weather than September in Alaska.
• While a bright moon provides illumination and color, it can potentially interfere with sky photography and overwhelm a faint aurora by lowering its contrast. Our stay coincided with the fourth moon phase (from half to new moon).

In order to remain mobile and keep an option to drive to wherever the weather is clear, I planned a road trip rather than a wilderness expedition.

This post is centered around my experience. Subsequent posts will detail logistical and technical aspects, which aren’t simple. At the end of this post, I also provide links to articles written by other photographers that give a great introduction to aurora photography.

Since I am a (adopted) Californian, the first night we decided to work not too far from Fairbanks as a “warm up”. If some cold weather equipment turned out to be inadequate, we could easily gear up. We initially planned to photograph at the Twelve Mile Summit (milepost 85.5 on the Steese Highway), which offers a great view over snowy mountains, but it was just too windy to stay outside for any extended period of time, let alone attempt night photography. Snowplow operators recommended we go back promptly because the snowdrift threatened to block the road, which was closed a bit further, at Eagle Summit.

We drove down to a large pullout. As it was our first night in Alaska, we were excited to see the green band of light of the Aurora show up, but it was rather low on the horizon. My friend shivered during the night. As we drove back to Fairbanks, the aurora got brighter in the rear view mirror, putting on a much better show. We stopped many times to photograph, getting to a hotel only a few hours before dawn. Low (2).

We spent the morning shopping the numerous outdoor stores in Fairbanks, a better way to gear up, since they have polar-grade gear in abundance to try. I bought thick insulated, windproof bibs for less than $100, and my friend got a better sleeping bag. The next two days were to be at level 4 according to the UAF Geophysical Institute Aurora Forecast. The higher activity levels give a chance to see the aurora far south of the Arctic Circle while with lower activity levels, the activity is confined around the Arctic Circle. To take advantage of the opportunity, we drove south on the Parks Highway, hoping to catch activity above Denali National Park. The afternoon was cloudy, with just a bit of color appearing at sunset.

As a landscape photographer, even in shots where most of the interest is in the sky, I look for significant land features to include. Although our first night at the South Denali Viewpoint (milepost 135.2mi of Parks Highway), the aurora did show up, it was behind a dense cloud cover so we saw only a glow. Moderate (3). The next day, the clouds cleared up. At night, the aurora made a spectacular appearance above Denali and the Alaska Range, about forty miles away. Active (4).

Despite going to sleep (in the car, parked quite close to the highway since the pull-out was snowed-in) quite late, I got up to photograph the sunrise over the seldom-visible Mountain.

We drove back to Fairbanks, then went back to the Steese Highway. Since the next day we planned a long drive, we contented ourselves with observing the aurora from Cleary Summit. The scenery there consists mostly of meadows and rows of trees, but less than half an hour from Fairbanks, relatively high and free of light pollution, with a large parking area, the spot is popular with locals for aurora watching (larger version of the panoramic image). Active (4).

In order to get to the center of the aurora action, further north, we tacked the famous Dalton, the northernmost highway in the US, and its most isolated (more on it in a future blog post). There is only one place for services, midway of 414 miles of road, at Coldfoot. After refueling there, we arrived in Wiseman at dusk. During the whole afternoon, the weather had been cloudy.

The weather forecast called for light snow at night, so we were actually looking forward to a night of sleep, but after cooking dinner, we noticed that the sky was clearing. While the mountains of the Alaska Range range were distant, here we were at the base of the Brooks Range mountains (northernmost in the world). As we looked for an interesting mountain as a foreground, we found prominent Mount Sukakpak (milepost 207 of Dalton Highway). Active (4).

North of Wiseman, the road was solid ice. From what I read, it’s actually nicer than in summer, when gravel flies. The Dalton Highway, built to support the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and Trans-Alaska pipeline, is traversed daily by more than a hundred 18 wheelers trucks, and only partly paved.

Although this year I didn’t set foot into Gates of the Arctic National Park proper, I managed to find a good view over the mountains that form the eastern boundary of the park. The Aurora was there again, for a sixth consecutive night. Active (4). It had been a remarkably favorable week.

Resources

Here is a list of articles, all by photographers with great Alaskan aurora work, that I have found particularly useful:

• How to photograph the aurora borealis by Carl Donohue
• How to photograph the northern lights with a digital camera by Patrick Endres
• Hunting The Great Alaskan Aurora by Ben Hattenbach

Thanks for you help, and also special thanks to Rolf Hicker, another photographer with great aurora images from Alaska and the Yukon.

For aurora forecasts, I’ve relied mostly on the UAF Geophysical Institute Aurora Forecast which is easy to use and can even be accessed through dedicated iOS App, Android App and mailing list. During the first few days of our trip, the server was down due to volume of requests, but the mailing list was working. Here are a number of other forecast sites:

• Aggregate forecasts
• OVATION Auroral Forecast from NOAA
• NOAA POES satellite measurement
• AuroraMAX from Canadian Space Agency
• spaceweather.com news about Sun-Earth environment
• solarham.com solar cycle and radio VHF aurora on Tweeter @solarham
• AK Community Aurora notification page on FB on Tweeter: @auroranotify

Part 1 of 5: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

While Earth Day has been internationally celebrated for more than forty years, National Parks Week is a relatively recent initiative from the US National Park Service.

It has been argued that the National Parks are “America’s best idea” – recently in the Ken Burns film with that title. That idea first came to fruition with the creation of Yellowstone National Park (1872). Because at that time there was no state that could take care of such a vast land, Yellowstone National Park was placed in the custody of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which have continued to run the National Parks since, creating the National Park Service to that effect.

National Park Week (April 21-29) is a good time to visit, since the National Park Service is waiving all entrance fees. Personally, I always renew my annual National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands pass. Given the number of National Parks visit I do each year, it is a bargain at $80, but even if I did only a few annual visits, I’d still get it to support the system. Besides free entrance, this is a perfect time to consider how fortunate we are for the Park Service and for the nearly 400 lands and monuments that have been added since to the system.

This year, my images are associated with two products whose release coincides with National Park Week.

Fotopedia has just launched bersion 2.0 of Fotopedia National Parks app for iPad and iPhone with 3000+ of my images of the National Parks. Compared with version 1 (description here), there are notable improvements:

• several hundred new images
• high resolution images sized for the new iPad Retina display
• thematic stories updated every day in magazine-like format

To celebrate National Park week, the App is free. Download it on iTunes. Here are a few mentions of the App in the press: USA Today, LA Times, Forbes.

MapQuest has just launched MapQuest National Parks, a web-based guide with information on activities, wildlife and history, and some video commentary by park rangers. Each of the 58 entries opens with one of my panoramic images, and there is also an a series of posts featuring my comments on some favorite images. Here is a mention in Huffington Post.

Everyday should be Earth Day. We should remember year round that our planet and its resources are finite. Yet the occasion is a great catalyst for change, bringing 190 countries together, connecting because of a common concern instead of our differences. Let be sure to learn something new today, and apply it to our everyday life.

Brown most of year, dotted with poles and fences, the hills looming over Gorman Post Road, a country lane parallel to interstate 5, explode in color when spring conditions are right at about this time of the year. As a reminder not to take anything for granted, the area is slated for development.

When I strolled the streets of Daegu (fourth largest city in South Korea), I saw a pedestrian street lined up with retail stores for many outdoor gear brands, including Millet and Lafuma, two French brands that I’ve hardly seen anywhere in the US.

On the Namsam Mountain, near Gyeongju, there were as many hikers as on the Mist Trail – Yosemite’s most popular – on a summer day. But it was a rainy mid-November week-end, and the shortest trail there required 3 hours of walking, more than the Mist Trail.

It was an interesting mix of hiking and pilgrimage. Namsam Mountain is dotted with shrines and other religious sites at which hikers stopped to make offerings and prayers. Above the Sangseonam hermitage, a woman offered some kind of sacred bread to every passing person.

Since that was Asia, for most this was a social event rather than an individual pursuit. At the summit, groups proceeded to eat a picnic lunch, which didn’t consist of granola bars !

The next morning, I got up early to catch the first flight from Busan (second largest city in South Korea) to Jeju Island.

My goal for that day was to hike to the summit of Mt Hallasan, the highest mountain in South Korea at 1,950 metres (6,400 ft) high. The guidebook cautioned that one would need to start early. When I inquired at Jeju-si airport about public transportation to the trail head, I was told it was already too late for the day. To save time, rather than taking two buses, I hired a taxi.

Although Jeju Island has been called Asia’s Hawaii, it was already cold at sea level. When I got out of the taxi, I had to wear everything I had. I started on the Yeongsil trail, the first part of which consisted of a wooden staircase. After a steep climb, in a moment of great beauty, the forest above began to be turn to a rime ice-covered wonderland.

I stepped on a plateau with meadows which must have offered great views, except that everything was enshrouded in a white-out.

Such was the cold that I had to keep moving to stay warm. I couldn’t stop for more than five minutes. Yet, I crossed plenty of other hikers of all ages.

Boardwalks are supposed to make walking easier, but they turned out to be the most treacherous parts of the trail: once frozen, they were as slippery as an ice rink. In order to avoid tumbling like many others did in front of my eyes, I held onto the fence rails – which were frozen too.

Because of the conditions, it was pointless to continue further, so I warmed up at the Witseoreum shelter (where they sell spicy noodles) before going down through the less popular Eorimok Trail.

Fortunately the trail turned to lava rock, which because of its texture, was not slippery. It was curious to see the trees coated in ice and the ground dry. In the US West, during the winter bare trees stand above snow-covered ground.

I exited the summit cloud-cap just in time to observe the last light of the day on volcanic pinnacles. At the smaller trailhead, the last bus had left long ago. Thankfully, a kind restaurant owner who was about to close shop called a taxi for me. In the while I’d have to wait – since the taxi had to come from the airport – he offered me tea. Using my guidebook, I tried to figure out how to use public transportation to go to Seongsang Ilchulbong, at the other end of the island, to try and catch a sunrise above the famed crater.

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Frequent visitors to terragalleria.com may have noticed unusual, repeated periods of downtime over the past month, as well as a gap in updates. The quick explanation is that the server hosting the site was hacked. Sure, this has happened several times in the past, but each time I had been able to figure out which vulnerability the hackers had used, which (criminal) activities they had planned, and shut them out. Not this time, which opened to door to multiple, escalating attacks which eventually forced me to decommission the server and rebuild a new one. To get a sense of the aggravation I faced, read on the long explanation.

Let’s begin by addressing the most obvious concern. There isn’t much to steal on the server. For safety reasons, we do not store credit card numbers, simply passing them to our gateway. High-resolution digital files are valuable, by only if you can license them, a task which is nowadays quite difficult even for legitimate image creators. To the hacker’s credit, they did not vandalize the site contents. They seemed to be interested in the server only as a platform to try and compromise other systems and get access to them.

It started about a month ago. A reader reported to me that his anti-virus software had flagged the terragalleria.com website. An investigation based on time-stamps (to look at recently modified files) quickly showed that in one of the files containing Javascript utilities, the following code was appended (I’ve included it as an image because as text it is harmful !):

If this sounds like Hebrew to you, rest assured that it was the same for me until someone on G+ pointed me to the following page, which explains everything. The code was obfuscated to make it difficult to understand what it does: it creates a iframe – a special invisible frame around the webpage – which points to a website that tries to infect visitors with malware, which I can only assume (I didn’t download it, and nor should you ever download software with no clear purpose) allows them to take control of the victim’s computer.

Although getting rid of this particular code was easy, finding out how the hackers were able to plant it remained an unsolved challenge, as there are so many different security flaws which can be exploited to gain control over a computer. Even systems from the US Department of Defense are not immune to hacking. Since I didn’t know the extent to which the server was compromised, the safest thing to do was to rebuild the site. However, I was going to travel the following week, so I didn’t have time to do much. I also hoped that the intrusion was limited – as had been the case in the past. I left for Alaska.

In search of the Aurora, we drove north of Fairbanks on the Dalton Highway, passing the Arctic Circle. Although there were absolutely no services of any kind on the 240 mile stretch of road until Coldfoot -making it the most remote in North America – the nearby village of Wiseman (pop 13), has two B&Bs open year-round. Because our rental car was marginally equipped to deal with -30F weather, instead of camping further north, we stayed there. Unexpectedly, they provided for a few hours per day satellite-based internet.

That’s when I learned that my server woes were getting worse. The hackers were trying to use the compromised server to hack into other machines on the network, using what is called a “brute force attack” which consists of automatically trying to log on by trying thousands of different passwords (the reason you shouldn’t use simple passwords). As a result, the hosting company took the server offline after I had failed to respond to their warnings. Back in Fairbanks, we huddled in the public library to benefit from a reliable internet connection. At first we found themselves locked out from the system, but after assistance from the data center technicians, we had the main (root) password reset so we could do administrative tasks. My friend then found one of the backdoors they left and removed it.

All was (almost) quiet for a few days, but the following week they tried again to do brute force attacks against other computers. I was not able to locate the script nor the security hole, but at least I was able to stop the activity by disabling some system utilities.

A few days later, I discovered that they were back to trying to propagate malware using an iframe. But this time, they used more sophisticated methods. They had covered more carefully their tracks, since a time-stamp based search didn’t yield anything interesting. Instead of just modifying a single text file, they managed to get the webserver to append a malicious iframe for all web pages and all the domains hosted on the server. Protecting our visitors is the priority, so upon discovering that the server was trying to spread malware, I immediately shut down all web services.

I looked all day long at various configuration files, yet remained stumped. Because I hold a PhD in Computer Science, it is sometimes assumed that I am a wizard with computers. But in fact, I was mostly a mathematician studying the geometry of visual perception of three-dimensional space. I learned very little about system administration in grad school – there was no world wide web yet. I decided to simply abandon the server. This was the right decision, as in the following week, the situation degrated further. Not content with changing all the server passwords, they reconfigured the server so that even after reseting the root password it was not possible for me nor the data center technicians to log on. In the while, I received complaints from system administrators of large, well-known companies, into which they tried to hack using the server. I eventually put an end to this activity by wiping out all server contents with an OS reload.

Upon returning home from Alaska, I had already begun to plan for a new replacement server – kind of like burning your house to the ground and rebuilding it to get rid of vermin. I was looking at more complex solutions involving virtualization and cloud computing. However the server was now down, and every such day costs us quite a bit in lost business, so I decided to rebuid again a simple and cost-effective dedicated server. I rent a box running Linux on a brand new Quad Core Xeon 1270 – 3.40GHz (Sandy Bridge), 1 x 8MB cache w/HT, 2 GB DDR3 1333 RAM, 2x 750GB SATA II HDD with a 100 Mbps uplink port and a 3TB monthly data transfer allowance.

Besides the hardware upgrade – which greatly accelerate searches and dynamic loads – the main difference is that unlike on my previous servers, decided to forego a control panel (I used Plesk before), mostly for security reasons. The data center technicians had pointed out to specific Plesk-related vulnerabilities. A control panel provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to all services on your server. Without one, you administer your server by editing text files and typing commands.

I found out during installation that while a control panel makes configuration simpler and more foolproof (no messing all your web services because of a single missing directive or a mistyped command), its main benefit is that it provides web-ready software. In my case, all the installation went smoothly until I noticed that PHP (an active component of web pages) would not communicate with MySQL (the database). Since they are such basic and popular building blocks, you’d think that they would work right out of the box in a distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, but this wasn’t the case at all. After trying many things, I re-installed PHP from source, but in the process this happened to break httpd. At this point I got fed up with fiddling around without real understanding. I hired the services of a server administration company.

They fixed the problem promptly, and I was happy to get the site up again, first in an emergency instance without many functions. However, as I began to set-up my backup software, I found out that the hard drives were not configured properly. I had ordered the server with two hard drives, with the intention to use the second one for backup. However, the hosting company set up the drives as an LVM (Logical Volume Manager) volume group, which defeated the purpose. They recommended that I reload the OS and restart from scratch, although there exists a risky procedure to remove a drive from the LVM. As it had taken me more than a day to get to that point, I wasn’t too keen on doing it over again, so I asked my system administrator to try the procedure. Sure enough, it failed, leaving the server in a state where it wouldn’t even boot.

It quickly became clear that I had no choice but to reload the OS. I thought that I might as well upgrade to version 6 of RHEL as older versions sometimes lack critical security updates. It turned out to be even worse than RHEL 5. PHP didn’t even work properly. After trying to fix it without success, the system administrator recommended that instead I reload CentOS 5. I was surprised, since CentOS is the free – and supposedly functionally identical – version of the licensed RHEL, but indeed PHP and MySQL worked out of the box. This doesn’t mean that all my scripts worked, since software upgrades forced me to update my scripts, but at least the basics were there.

Acting as system administrator for two weeks was more than I cared for, but thanks to backups I didn’t loose any data. I just wished hackers would be more considerate in choosing their targets. Many companies who run websites with less traffic than terragalleria.com have full-time system administrators, but this is essentially a one-person operation. I have found that one of the main difficulties – and sometimes source of frustration – in running a small photography business is that one has to wear so many hats. Over the years, terragalleria.com has grown to become, amongst other things, a fully-featured stock photography website and digital wallpaper subscription site. That it needed to run on its own server, which was at the root of last month’s troubles, is something I suppose I should be grateful for, as it had provided me my own path to full-time photography.

Upon arriving in Gyeongju, I headed towards the Hanjin Hostel, conveniently situated a few blocks from the bus station. When traveling overseas solo, I prefer to stay at hostels because the management is usually a useful resource, and speaks English, a big plus in a country with a strange script. I’ve found that hostels often provide services that normal hotel don’t, and that their owners are generally friendly and welcoming to independent travelers.

That was certainly the case of “Master” Kwon Clint. Granted, Mr. Kwon has created a nice map of Gyeongju that he gives free to each guest, together with some tour advice, but his quiet generosity and availability goes beyond that. Since I don’t plan much in advance, I wanted to make sure I had a flight reserved for Jeju Island before heading out to explore Gyeongju. After spending half an hour on my iPad, I couldn’t get the website of Jeju Air – a smaller airline with cheaper fares than the mainstream carriers Koran Air and Asiana Airlines – to work for me: I kept getting an error message in Korean. I asked Mr. Kwon to refer me to a travel agent, but he told me that I wouldn’t be able to book such a flight through them, and instead offered to help me. When he figured out that the error was caused by the Jeju Air website refusing a foreign credit card, he offered to use his own to complete the transaction.

Mr. Kwon’s family also opened their home and life. I happened to be there on the day when Korean people prepare their staple kim-chi for the winter in the yard. Even before stepping out of the hostel, I had a look at one of the most interesting traditions I saw on my trip.

Upon learning of my plans to stay only two days in Gyeongju before flying to Jeju Island, Mr. Kwon mentioned that Gyeongju was the most interesting place in Korea. Based on what I saw during my whirlwind trip, I’d have to agree. Right in the middle of the town, I found an impressive complex of tumuli.

A short bus ride outside of town, Bulguksa temple is a masterpiece of the golden age of Buddhist art in the Silla kingdom, centered in Gyeongju, which lasted for the first millennium and ruled most of the Korean Peninsula between the 7th and 9th centuries

Bulguksa is linked to the sacred Seokguram Grotto by a winding path.

I read that the Seokguram Grotto is a popular place to watch the sun rise over the distant sea. On that rainy day, there was no view, but I enjoyed even more the atmosphere created by the mist.

Fall foliage was past peak in Seoul, but on Nov 18th, it was still brilliant in Gyeongju.

Gyeongju is often referred to as “the museum without walls” because of the exceptionally large number of historical sites spread in and around.

Hundreds of them – ruined temples, stone statues, pagodas, and lanterns – are scattered on Mount Namsan, a mountain that was held sacred by the Silla people, and still continues to draw pilgrims – and hikers.

More images of Gyeongju.

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