At Zuber’s River Camp, with Old Baldy in the background.
The terms of the campground reservation required a three-day stay. This was fine with us; it was a beautiful location, and we would be entirely avoiding the post-eclipse traffic jams. So Saturday and Sunday and even Monday morning—eclipse day– were open to enjoy the scenery at our place in Texas Hill Country.
Our compound within the camp comprised “Cabin H” with power and plumbing, and three shelters (“7” “8”, and “9”), which were basically screened-in porches with an electrical outlet. The shelters were surrounded by outdoor space to pitch a tent or park a camper.
Our fellow eclipse partiers gradually joined us on Saturday and Sunday. They set up their camping arrangements (tents, campers, shelters, or cabin facilities) and then went exploring.
Eclipse photography dress rehearsal in my back yard.
While Poldi was preparing food-for-the-masses, I was preparing other things. The big attraction the eclipse held for me was its rare opportunity to capture unique photos of the sun.
In 2017 I had participated in “The Modern Eddington Experiment“, trying to photograph the nearby stars to see if they were deflected by the sun’s gravity as Einstein predicted. My results were inconclusive, but I really enjoyed the challenge of getting the pictures and analyzing the results afterward.
This year I registered to contribute to the Eclipse Mega Movie, a less complex project but one that matched my desire to capture the corona, which as we near the peak of the solar cycle should be even larger than it was in 2017.
To do this, I needed to precisely control the camera during totality. As often occurs with our rapidly evolving technology, much has changed in the seven years since 2017. I had a new camera and a new computer, several hardware and software versions later than my previous eclipse session. The software application I had used before had become obsolete, no longer able to run on the new laptop and operating system. The author had not migrated it to the latest platform.
Fortunately, a new program had been created that could fill its role– it had fewer features but was entirely adequate for what I wanted to do. I was pleased to discover it.
I remembered the excitement at the 2017 eclipse site, of various groups gathered in the campground, enjoying the spirit around the campfires. One of the groups was from an astronomy club, and they had made special eclipse event t-shirts for their members to wear with pride and distinction. When I expressed how impressed I was with the design, the group leader offered to sell me one. I took him up on it and have worn it frequently since.
Seeing an opportunity to do something similar for our group, I put together a design. It was much simpler than the one I admired in 2017, but it featured one of my photos from that eclipse. It documented the time and place of our eclipse party, and it had a banner declaring “Total Solar Eclipse!”. Rather than making it big and bold, I realized that I could use the dot-matrix font of the name projection cards, which tied in the pinhole projection activity nicely. I further realized that I could represent the full progression of the eclipse by evolving the dots into thin crescents, and then back to full disks. I was eventually satisfied with this design and stopped tweaking it.
Now I needed to find some way to get it printed onto shirts. I hadn’t ever done a project like this, but with all the zillions of t-shirts one encounters, I figured there must be some businesses that specialize in it. My concern was that my small print run would not be of interest to them—the setup expense would be too high and the margins too small.
As co-host of Thor and Poldi’s Excellent Eclipse Party, I wanted to provide something that might augment Poldi’s gourmet camping meals. I was inspired by a YouTube presentation of how to enjoy the eclipse, including during the partial phases leading up to totality, and how to safely view the sun during this time (over an hour). One of the techniques was the use of “pinhole projection” where a small hole in an opaque panel projects an image of the sun onto a flat surface. It is an embodiment of a pinhole camera, but aimed at the sun.
In 1963 a solar eclipse crossed North America. I was living where the eclipse would be 80% full and I recall my dad setting up a pinhole projector so we could watch the progress of the eclipse. The image showed a small crescent, like the moon. This left an indelible memory on an impressionable 10-year old, but even more so, was seeing the multitude of crescents projected along the street in front of our house. The cathedral ceiling of elm trees along the avenue had holes in it, formed by the gaps between the leaves. Each was its own pinhole and cast a crescent image on the pavement. This is what left the strongest impression on me that day.
Today I understand the physics and optics of what made those images, but it does not diminish the awe and wonder I have for the effect. I wanted to see it again at this eclipse, and to that end I designed cardstock pages with holes punched in them for our eclipse partiers to project. The holes spelled out the name of each guest in a dot-matrix font.
I considered how to punch all these holes and soon realized that doing this by hand would not work. I did not have the tools or patience for such a task. I considered acquiring a laser cutter, but this would be a new technology to me, one that I didn’t have the time to learn. I contacted a local shop, but was not confident in their response to my request (“we’ll have to experiment to see if this will work”), and it would be expensive.
Fortunately, as I described the situation to my talented and well-equipped friend Odd Dave, he offered to make them on his laser cutter (of course he had one, and he wanted to keep it in condition by using it). I sent him a test file, he “printed” it with seemingly little effort, and then proceeded to punch the rest of them. He mailed them to me with plenty of time to pack them with the other eclipse equipment.
The eclipse partiers were thrilled to receive these custom-punched cards and looked forward to making projections of their names during the partial phases of the eclipse. Sadly, nearly all of that time was overcast. One needs a full view of the sun for the projection to be effective. There were a few openings early in the eclipse, and one might be able to make out the solar disk images with a small “bite” taken out, but the more dramatic projections of thin crescents were clouded out.
I hope they save the “name hole projection” cards for their next eclipse.
Pinhole projections of dot-matrix punched names during the brief periods of clear sun.Name projections during the sunny moments.
The Rio Frio, beneath Old Baldy, a beautiful spot to await an eclipse.
Two years ago, in anticipation of the 2024 eclipse, I made a reconnaissance trip to Texas, where the historical odds of clear skies were the highest in the US. I located a similar campground to the one we had enjoyed in Idaho, this time along the Frio River in the “Hill Country” of Texas. Zuber’s River Camp was a few hundred meters from the centerline of the eclipse and would yield over four minutes of that bizarre condition we wanted to experience again. I didn’t know two years ago who might want to join us, but I made a guess and put my name on a waiting list for campground shelters.
I sent out an invitation and attracted the attention of several of those who had joined us in 2017. Word spread to relatives, friends, friends of friends, and friends of relatives, and soon we had a full roster. Many in the group had not seen the total eclipse in 2017, or ever.
We secured the campground reservations and plans came together. Poldi, who seems to have a natural desire to feed groups of people, became the camp quartermaster and took on the challenge of planning a menu, pre-cooking and preserving, and the logistics of acquiring fresh provisions on our route to the Texas site. She did reconnaissance and training runs at the local Costco store. She estimated the capacity of coolers and containers and stockpiled all the necessary cooking supplies and staples.
While Poldi was creating and refining her plans for food, I was making other plans. Despite the widespread advice to not spend the precious few minutes of totality fussing with camera settings, I wanted to take pictures. Pictures of the sun’s prominences and corona and maybe even a timelapse of the eclipse. Expert advice or not, it is what I do.
In addition to planning for my photographic goals, I wanted to do something to help bind this group of people, none of whom knew everyone– even the hosts had not met them all! This inspired two more preparation projects: “name card projections” and the creation of a t-shirt design, to be described next.
A panorama of Harvard’s Biology Laboratories building, distorted by the wide angle view (click to enlarge, then click again to see animal frieze details).
I wrote earlier about the unique entrance to Harvard’s Biological Laboratories building, which today is home to the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. My grandfather, who studied in the then state-of-the-art laboratories shortly after being built in 1931, had taken a photograph in the entry of the building. I found it to be a beautiful image that captured the novel decorations on the doors and their shadows cast onto the marble floor. I wanted to see and experience this space.
The opportunity presented itself when Poldi’s “Italian sister” Rossella decided to visit while Poldi was in New York– she also expressed interest in seeing Boston, a few hours away. I invited myself to join their mini-fall tour of New England and they humored me by helping locate the Biology Labs building on the Harvard campus. It was as distinctive as I had imagined.
The exterior of the building is adorned with animal friezes designed by Katherine Lane Weems, pneumatically carved into the crest of the brick façade. It is a large building and the animals overhead command your attention until you notice the life-sized rhinoceroses at ground level, also created by the young artist, and which have become mascots (“Victoria” and “Bessie”) for the Harvard biology community.
The Roving Photons on the steps of the Physics Building (now the Tate Laboratory of Physics) ca 1975. Standing, left to right: Kevin Loeffler, Richard Dorshow, Thor Olson, Jeffrey Harvey, John Bowers, Kevin Thompson. Squatting: Greg Hull, Curt Weyrauch.
I first attended the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1971. I was accepted to the Institute of Technology, IT (now College of Science and Engineering, CSE) but faced the difficulty of narrowing my interests which ranged from science to art, from mathematics to theater. My initial major, architecture, was inspired by a desire to combine art and science, romanticized by the Ayn Rand novel “The Fountainhead”. That idealistic goal was punctured by the first lecture of Architecture 101, where in retrospect, I recognize that the professor portrayed the profession in its worst possible light in order to weed out students who were not fully and utterly devoted, focused, and dedicated to the field.
It worked. I changed majors the next day.
But I was still registered for all the courses required for training in architecture, including math and physics, important for structural analyses to guarantee the strength and safety of buildings. I continued these courses, and even while shifting my major to Fine Arts, I still wanted to learn “the secrets of the universe”. Eventually, I found the reliability of science to be more aligned with my internal quest than the apparent arbitrariness of the art world. Don’t get me wrong, I admire artists and consider them to be explorers, and the reports from their journeys inspire and motivate me. But I realized that I did not have the qualifications to lead or undertake those journeys.
Instead, I focused on how Nature works; this is the domain of physics. And I found myself in a small group of classmates that were similarly enthused. Somehow (I don’t remember the details), we became members of an informal club, “The Roving Photons,” whose motto was “A roving photon gathers no mass”. We attended the same classes; were confronted with the same contradictory anomalies of quantum physics and we all struggled to make sense of it.
I like to brag about the classmates I studied with. One of them, John Bowers, went on to become a leader in the field of photonics (appreciate your fiber optic internet connection) . Another, Kevin Thompson, contributed to the corrective optics for the Hubble Telescope.
My freshman dormitory colleague Craig Holt, discovered an important physics-mathematical relationship, now named after him, as is an endowment for a scholarship at the University of Minnesota. My roommate during our junior and senior year, Jeff Harvey, went on to become a physics professor and contributor to string theory. Others became teachers and engineers, extending our knowledge of the universe and demonstrating how to utilize it, to the next generations. It all started in our undergraduate classes at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s.
Here is the recollection of one of my classmates and Roving Photon member Richard Dorshow (who later contributed to the development of medical devices and pharmaceuticals), as reported in 2010 by the newsletter of the School of Physics and Astronomy.
“…One of my favorite memories was from my sophomore year. A small group of us formed an undergraduate physics club, The Roving Photons. I was elected Executive Director, mainly because I wrote the rules for election and eliminated the competition. It was a very friendly group of comrades (Greg, two Kevins, Jeff, John and Thor). We were given a small, narrow room in the sub-basement of the Physics building.
“There was an exit sign in the hallway outside the door. Thor, who was also an art major, somehow put the club name on two pieces of glass and we replaced the exit sign with the glass such that we had a lighted club sign. I think the sign lasted less than one night as it apparently violated the fire safety code. We had a refrigerator in the club room and arranged a delivery of pop every so often.
“Our main impact was a faculty lecture we sponsored and arranged. We would take the faculty speaker out to lunch on the day of the presentation. I remember we used to go to Sammy D’s. I think our first speaker was Professor Gasiorowicz. [He was] a favorite, whose explanations of probability usually involved some sort of food analogy: a tablespoon of peanut butter spread over a cracker, many crackers, and then the entire universe to explain probabilities. I still have an autographed copy of his book written and completed during my time at the university.
“The school used to get audited by the American Physics Society and a group of distinguished physicists came to do the audit. This included William Fowler, then president or president-elect of the APS, and also the famous physicist Herman Feshbach. Because there was an undergraduate physics club, the distinguished group talked to us too. Here we were with this group of esteemed physicists and we were telling them about the lunches at Sammy D’s, and the soda pop delivery. In hindsight, this seems a very surreal event.”
Rick’s description captures only a small portion of our experience as students during the 1970s, a turbulent but productive time in physics. A “zoo” of new subatomic particles were being discovered, all of which would be clues leading to the now famous “Standard Model” of quantum mechanics. We were in the middle of it all but didn’t really know. To me, it made little sense.
And it is still challenging. Although I was distracted from my study of physics by the exploding field of electronics brought on by miniaturized transistors (and because just about any physics experiment requires electronic instrumentation), I continued to follow the developments in physics throughout my career. Reading their Wikipedia entries, the inspiration from my superstar classmates of 1975 is part of why I am still curious enough to engage in online courses for learning how to program a quantum computer.
The quantum “measurement problem” has not yet been resolved to my satisfaction, but Schroedinger’s cat is being cornered. The recent measurements of gravitational waves, the unexpected acceleration of the universe, dark matter, dark energy and other fascinating observations may be today’s equivalent of those confusing 1970 particle zoo clues, pointing us to a “New Standard Model”. I hope someday to learn about it!
Short (50 feet) reels of 16mm home movies in their Kodak mailing boxes
I have written before about the treatment of family photos and other artifacts from previous generations. I recently re-encountered the collection of old 16mm home movies made by each of my grandfathers, which span a time range from the 1930s to the 1960s. I had sort of decided that I didn’t want to invest the time and expense of converting them to modern digital media just to look through them maybe once, wondering who these unknown people are, at events and places that have no particular meaning to me.
Still, I couldn’t bring myself to discard them, ending their life in some landfill. So I made a final effort to find someone who might actually be interested in them, perhaps as props for period theater productions, or as some old-timey footage to place in a modern film project. A google search did not find such uses, other than to mention that there is a market for old movies, without really listing many. But one suggestion was to check with local historical societies, who are sometimes interested in them for research and documentary purposes.
I grew up watching my father, following his father’s example, coming up each year with handmade Christmas cards that nearly always included a family photograph. They were both avid amateur photographers and would corral and cajole my siblings and me into a studio-like set in the living room with carefully positioned lights and a camera mounted on a tripod that would be aimed at a scene of dressed-up children surrounding their proud parents. This often occurred at our family Thanksgiving gathering, allowing just enough time for my mother to get prints made, mounted into cards (often with her hand-stenciled or stamped cover designs), personal greetings inscribed, and envelopes addressed and stamped, all before the week of Christmas.
A photograph taken by my grandfather in the 1930s. Where is this unusual entryway?
In recent weeks I have been reviewing old family photos in preparation for a covid-delayed memorial. Among the too many pictures of unidentified people and places are some intriguing treasures. The relatives who could tell me more about them are now gone. I can’t ask them, which is one of the more frequent and sad experiences I have these days.
But sometimes it is possible to follow clues in the photos to find the answers. In this case it is a photo that my grandfather took, possibly back in the 1930s. It shows a beautiful composition of light and shadow of a building entrance/lobby. I liked the lighting, but I really enjoyed discovering the detail on the door panels that were casting the shadows: insects and plants. What building would host such artwork?
Google search is an amazing technology. A response to “door panels insects plants” did not yield anything useful, but by adding “Harvard” to the terms (knowing my grandfather had studied biology there) and looking for image results, I found a unique building: the Harvard Biology Laboratory.
The building was built in 1931 and obviously impressed my grandfather, where he likely spent considerable time in it pursuing his doctorate. It continues to impress, as recent posts attest. As I look at the pictures of the outside of the building, who wouldn’t find it intriguing?
It turns out that there are three doors to the entry; my grandfather’s shot depicted two. But there is a hint of another– a bicycle is parked there, and sure enough the current pictures show a third door, adorned by sea creatures. All of them, and the sculptures outside, created by Katherine Lane Weems.
All of this makes me want to visit. I now have a memento from the past that would be fun to re-create!
Thor's Life-Notes 