4 Mount Hood

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4.1  Sabbatical Hiatus

The night at Many Glacier would be the last for my night sky photography for several weeks as I now was scheduled to meet my family in Seattle for a more conventional vacation.  In addition to the usual outdoor camping and hiking activities we typically seek, this time there was an additional agenda.  

My son, urged and aided by my wife, had selected several colleges to consider for that distant (to him) time when he would once again be called a freshman.  Somehow, he had arranged that the list contained no schools within a 500-mile radius of our home, making the process of visiting their campuses a large undertaking.  Several of the candidates however were clustered in the northwest states, and we had devised an itinerary to intermix campus tours with our other activities.

So for the next two weeks I would have little opportunity to aim my cameras at a dark sky.  But it was getting more and more difficult to do this anyway, as the moon dominated the sky until late each night.  If I thought the wait for the moon to set was long at Many Glacier, it would only get longer from here on out.

I made my way across the panhandle of Idaho, and once again across the desert of Washington, but this time crossing the Cascades into the lush land to their west.  I had errands and duties to perform in preparation for reuniting with my family, including finding a place I could trust to develop my film- both E6 and C41 type rolls.  Seattle was large enough to meet this requirement, and I would get a peek at my latent images turned real.  That peek contained setbacks and failed exposures, as usual, but also some unexpected and enchanting images.

After the college campus touring circuit came to an end, and with my son relieved to be done with it, we aimed the overloaded minivan east of Portland to the Mt Hood Recreation Area.

Nightscape Odyssey
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Seven Years After

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A panorama taken from the viewpoint at the “elders table”. Officiating the event with his wife Karen, Max Allers had just declared “By the superpowers vested in me, I now pronounce Thor and Poldi truly united!”  (Click to zoom, and see if you can find yourself in the crowd.)

Seven years ago we hosted The (happily ever) “After” Party.  It combined a renovation-housewarming (a year after the “Before” Party), and a commitment ceremony to mark the choice to share our lives in This Odd House.  It had a sixties theme, having both grown up as quasi-hippies in the sixties, and both turning 60 that month, Poldi on that very day!

It has been a wonderful seven years since, filled with love and adventures, and we had hoped to invite everyone back to reflect on them and to see what has happened since.  While many of us have experienced life events and transitions in the intervening years (marriages, births, deaths, retirements), none of us could have predicted we would all be staying at home, avoiding gatherings to avoid germs for a full year.

Eventually we will be back to some form of a new normal when we can get together and exchange those stories.  In the meantime, here is a picture of the setting in our backyard seven years ago.  In this picture we are at the end of the sidewalk with champagne, reveling in the affection and love of all the people with whom we were sharing this highlight moment of our lives.

Watching for Perseids

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Extracted from a frame in the timelapse series showing a Perseid meteor streaking along the path of the Milky Way toward the current position of Jupiter.

Every year in August the Earth passes through a comet debris field, and when a grain of comet dust falls through the atmosphere it heats up and vaporizes, showing as a streak of light and sometimes leaving a glowing trail.   We enjoy seeing them as “falling stars”. 

This year, as part of our Covid-coping strategy, we were on a two-day camping trip to a state park during the meteor shower.  It was a fortuitous coincidence, unexpectedly accompanied by clear weather.  I set up some cameras hoping to capture the meteors, but they were elusive.  As a consolation, I assembled the frames into a timelapse and although only a few frames caught meteors, they did capture some of the other beautiful elements of the night sky.

The brightest star is actually planet Jupiter, and it has a bright companion to the left, Saturn.  The Milky Way is visible as it moves slowly across the sky with them.  Some of the bright spots move more rapidly.  The steady ones are satellites, the others are airplanes.  Mid- and high level clouds form, move, and evaporate over the duration of the timelapse (3-1/2 hours).

A meteor itself is a momentary flash, leaving a faint streak on the image frame.  A sharp-eyed observer may find some in the video, but it only shows as one frame among the 30 per second.  One such frame has been extracted, showing a meteor strike seemingly aimed at Jupiter.

I have accidentally enjoyed the Perseids throughout my life, as I have often been on camping and backpacking trips in August.  The night sky is awe-inspiring in any dark sky site and it is all the more so when accented by the long bright streamers created as we travel through comet dust.

The Silent Key

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The Vibroplex Deluxe Original telegraph key, first manufactured in 1939.

I was moved recently by an unexpected item encountered while clearing out my parents’ home.  They both passed away in recent years leaving, as we all will, a lifetime of accumulated possessions.  Perhaps it is a rite of passage that we all mark our parents’ passing with tributes and shared memories, and then respectfully distribute their earthly possessions.

Those possessions usually include home furnishings of a previous era, and clothing that might fit but doesn’t match anyone’s current style or fashion.  Many kitchen utensils will find their way to donation centers.  Easy items to dispatch are those for which there are few memories.  The more difficult are those with sentimental attachments.  

My dad was an amateur radio operator, a “ham”, which is a term for the enthusiasts across the world that participate in this form of communication, ever since Marconi sent his first wireless message.  There is a broad and varied number of these practitioners of a discipline that requires technical expertise and skill, and a desire to share their experiences “over the air”.  

I grew up in this culture, listening to the chirps and squawks of my dad’s radio receiver late into the nights.  One of the essential ham skills was to tap out Morse code messages with a telegraph key — the first level of an amateur radio license (“Novice Class”) required proficiency at five words a minute.  My dad was extremely skilled at this and could signal at much higher rates.  As one improved in this skill, the limitations moved from brain-hand coordination to the mechanical key itself.

This limitation was recognized early on, and various ingenious adaptations of the simple momentary contact key were invented.  Some worked better than others.  Over the course of my dad’s ham career he acquired various makes and models of telegraph keys with which he competed in amateur radio contests, to see who could make contact with the most other hams in a weekend.

His amateur radio station equipment will find homes with other ham operators, but his set of telegraph keys were distributed to his children, all of whom have those memories of dot-dash Morse code beeps in the night.  This is the item I received:  on a beautiful chrome-plated base, the key itself is a delicate collection of mechanical components, carefully balanced and customized to the hand of the operator.  I am told that operators have a distinct “signature” that can be recognized when listening to the delivery of Morse code, each hand having its own rhythm and style.

This identifies the manufacturer, Vibroplex, and proudly displays its serial number and patented status.  The logo is a lightning bug, carefully anodized or painted red on the brass plate, a feature maintained even on current models.  This may be a collector’s item as there are many similar to be found at http://www.vibroplexcollector.net.

The ham community has an endearing term of respect for their fellow amateurs who have since passed away: Silent Key.  It is a reference to the early days of telegraphy where the letters SK were sent to designate the end of a transmission, and then the station would become silent.  

There is a national silent key registry,  the cumulative obituaries of the ham community, where you can look up life accounts of past amateurs, including my dad, K0TO.

His station is silent now, but my memories of it will remain until I too become silent.

Of Nikons and Nikomats

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Showing a few bruises from years of heavy use in my home, at school, during protest marches and on backpacking trips, this is my first single lens reflex camera, the Nikomat brought back from Japan by my dad’s business contact.

A half-century ago I was a teenager in high school, fascinated with cameras and photography.  I had progressed from my first Kodak Instamatic to a (used) Kodak Retina-II 35mm; both are considered “rangefinder” cameras:  you looked through a viewfinder that simulates what the lens sees.  

But what I really wanted was a single lens reflex camera, a Nikomat, a camera one step down from the famous flagship product of the Japanese camera maker, Nikon.  A “single lens reflex” (SLR) is a high-performance camera, where the view through the eyepiece comes through a complex arrangement of mirrors and prisms from the very lens that will be recording the picture.  The key to this magic is a mirror on a spring-loaded hinge that provides the periscope-like view through the lens while aiming and composing the shot.  When the shutter release button is pressed, the mirror swings out of the way just in time for the shutter to open and expose the film.

I acquired my first SLR by saving the earnings from my summer job flipping hamburgers at the local drive-in.  Except it wasn’t enough.  My dad helped out, not by a contribution, but by asking an associate who occasionally made business trips to Japan to make a camera purchase on my behalf, since the local cost was significantly lower than the imported retail price in the U.S. and, crucially, within my savings.  At that time such long-distance business trips were rare, and I had to wait several more months for my camera to arrive.  

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Swedish Candelabras – Finis

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It is considered good practice to finish up the old projects before embarking on new ones, but that doesn’t seem to be my way.  The new one gets started and the old one languishes in its nearly complete state, sometimes for years, until I grant amnesty, allowing it to fade into memory.

I had reached the point in the Swedish candelabra project where the challenges of woodworking had been solved, a working prototype had been made, a dozen pieces had been crafted, and all that was left were the trivial details of wiring the electric LED candles.

It turned out that, while not technically challenging, it was incredibly tedious, threading wires, stripping insulation, soldering the bulb contacts, splicing connections and gluing the simulated plastic candlesticks in place.  The first one I assembled took hours.

With eleven more to go, I found lots of excuses to not do them.  Eventually however, when the summer heat advisories provided reason to retreat to the cool workroom in my home, I would complete one, or maybe two, each day.  Eventually I reached the last one, by which time I was proficient– only an hour of assembly!

I can now declare this project complete, and I look forward to displaying the candelabras in our windows when the season shifts once again to long cold nights.  I hope they are seen by the passing neighbors as signs of hope, warmth, welcome, and good cheer, just like the ones we enjoyed in Sweden.

The ancestral home of my great-great-grandfather Sven Johan Lundberg in Mulseryd, Sweden, during a light snowfall last December. If you look closely you will find that each window hosts a welcoming candelabra.

The 15-minute rule, and other covid recommendations

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Keeping an eye on my watch while conversing.

Since writing the previous blog entry (“What is my risk?”) I have encountered additional information to refine the risk calculation I outlined.  I found a reference that provides a better value for the relative intensity of aerosol generation between the activities of talking and passive breathing: approximately 10X (compared to my placeholder value of 2).  When this weighting is applied to the social interaction duration histogram, the critical exposure is reduced from four person-intensity-hours to three.  

This does not seem like a large impact on critical exposure but the intensity level associated with talking now requires that all of those short interactions become shorter.  If the critical exposure is 3 hours at level 1 (silent breathing in the same room), and talking is 10 times more intense, then an exposure of 0.3 hours (18 minutes) in conversation with an infectious person will deliver the critical dose of virus-laden aerosols.  This suggests a limit of 15 minutes in any interaction with a stranger: the 15-minute rule.

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What is my risk?

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Taking a calculated risk at a favorite restaurant’s outdoor patio

Ever since the covid19 stay-at-home orders were relaxed for my state, I have been struggling to find some rules to guide me as we try to safely host small gatherings with qualified friends (today’s rules: outdoors, safe-distancing, maximum of two guests–who have also been in semi-quarantine).

I’d like to know “what is my risk?” after encountering N people in a day and spending a certain amount of time with each.  In particular, if I interact with store clerks for a few minutes each, walk or bicycle past maybe a hundred people, or sit in a (sparse) movie theater with a few dozen others for two hours, what risks am I taking?  I want to put it in relative terms with the risk I willingly accept when I drive a few miles for an everyday errand.

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Swedish Candelabras

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A modest Swedish house in Skalo, Poldi’s ancestral home. Nearly all the houses are in this traditional red color with white trim.
A close up shows the candelabras in the windows, a wintertime custom here.

While in Sweden over the Christmas season, we noticed the popularity of candelabras placed in the windows of people’s homes.  In these northern latitudes where the darkness of the winter night dominates the few hours of daylight, the distinctive chevron of lights provided a cheery greeting from the windows of the traditional-styled Swedish houses.  

I thought it would be a nice accent to our own home with its not-so-traditional windows cut into a mansard roof.  Surely Ikea would have such an item, with some suitable unpronounceable name, but I was disappointed.  Perhaps I needed to shop the Ikea stores in Sweden rather than our Americanized versions of them.

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3.5 Dark Sky Enforcement at Many Glacier

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A daytime shot of the Many Glacier Hotel.

Glacier Park presents its most fascinating face at the end of a road that penetrates as far as it can into the body of the park before being stopped by dramatic features with names like “The Garden Wall”, “Iceberg Notch”, and “The Salamander”. At the end of the road is a hotel that is bathed in views of these mountain features and other spectacular carved peaks, many of which still bear glaciers. Hence the name of this unique place, Many Glacier.

In front of the hotel is Swiftcurrent Lake, candidate for my desired composition containing reflected star trails.  On the night I was here however, so was the moon.  I waited for it to set, a long wait until it finally fell below the horizon.  Until then it was eclipsed by Grinnell Point, looming in front of me.  Although the moon was now no longer directly visible, it still lit the sky. Film is cheap (I keep telling myself) and I never know if the sky will stay clear, so I made several exposures during the moon’s gradual hidden descent. The wind was calm, and the lake became smooth. I hoped the conditions would hold.

I dared only leave the shutter open for 30 minutes though; the sky would wash out if exposed longer. During this time the moon drifted down behind Grinnell Point, leaving a trailing glow. I looked around at the scene, wondering what else would be captured on film.

The lake had become so calm and the water was so clear that I could see the bottom! I was intrigued by the array of fallen trees and rocks and other natural lake bottom material. Then I took a larger view and found it a bit distracting. I wondered if the camera would see reflections of the stars at all. How is it that I could see this underwater debris anyway? The moon wasn’t bright enough to light the scene in this way.

The view at Many Glacier, lights on.

Behind me, the hotel guests had gradually turned out their room lights and gone to bed. But like all contemporary buildings, modern or primitive it seems, there were outdoor security lights aimed all around, including at me by the shore of the lake!

The Many Glacier Hotel is an old renovated lodge-like building. A combination of rustic log construction and swiss chalet trim makes it a novel structure at the edge of the lake. Its five stories make it seem unnaturally tall, even in an environment of tall lodgepole pines. Each floor has a lakeside balcony, each balcony connects with an outdoor stairway, each staircase with an access door illuminated by floodlights. Here was the source of my unwanted lighting.

I proceeded up the stairway, stopping at each door, and with gloves normally intended for cold-protection, unscrewed each overhanging floodlamp bulb until the entire end of the hotel became dark. It was a clandestine act, but in the name of fighting local light pollution I committed the deed.

The moon was still setting, now behind the distant peak of Swiftcurrent Mountain. Wisps of clouds were coming in, the air frequently breaking the glass surface of the lake, but I made a one-hour exposure, this time without the distraction of the foreground lake bottom.

Swiftcurrent Lake, lights off.

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