Six nights after one early nocturnal visit to Kilauea’s Halemaumau crater, competing for space with other onlookers and photographers, we returned for more, with fewer people. Later, after midnight local time, it was just us and the volcano for short spells, with occasional hissing and gurgling noises evident despite the distance of nearly a mile (made to look shorter by employing a deep zoom). Brilliantly glowing, yellow lava splashed visibly into the air beyond the crater rim, hurled aloft from a raised base elevation of the pool level not seen in many years, and a foreboding foretelling of the major lava-plumbing drain down the East Rift that would occur a few months later. Steam from the process formed a flammagenitus cloud plume and merged at right with a thin strand of stratus that just had formed in the ambient boundary layer, as the moist air mass diabatically cooled away from the volcanic plume.
3 WSW Volcano HI (4 Jan 18) Looking SSE
19.4197, -155.2879