I had to agree that it was an unusual gas station.
It looked like an airport control tower with a cantilevered roof that protected the customers at the gas pumps – protection from rain and sun that is common today but in 1978, and certainly 20 years earlier when built, it was novel. The pumps were fueling the local cars: a mix of old gas guzzlers and newer more fuel-efficient models that were a response to the oil embargos of the 70s.
We were on the way to our business destination—the US Steel mine near Mountain Iron Minnesota, a town slowly being eaten up by the open pit mine as it followed the deposits of diffuse iron known as taconite.
I was the passenger in Steve Haverberg’s VW microbus. Steve was familiar with the area and knew I would enjoy seeing a gas station that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. We needed gas anyway and it was a good time to stop and stretch.
Another vehicle was also on its way to the mine, but had taken a more direct route. It was equipped with a 4-foot long cylindrical probe, to be lowered by cable into a drill hole. A custom-built instrument specialized for detecting iron ore was also in that truck.
A hiking group finds its way across Grinnell Glacier in 1970.
Most people now acknowledge that the climate has changed, even if they don’t agree on the reasons for it. Some of us are old enough to have seen the change firsthand.
As a teenager in 1970, I went on a hike with my family in Glacier National Park, a six-mile and 2000 foot climb to Grinnell Glacier. It was a thrilling experience to be hiking in the mountains, and then to actually walk out onto a real glacier! Both mountains and glaciers were things I had read about, but never personally experienced.
It was a ranger-led hike, and I learned a lot from the ranger’s descriptions of the geology, the plant and animal life, and the nature of glaciers, for which this park was named. I remember him telling us that the glaciers were shrinking. Nobody knew why, but it was possible that in a century they would all be gone. The park would still be called “Glacier”, but for the characteristic and beautiful glacier-cut valleys, not for the presence of glaciers themselves.
I have since had the opportunity to visit a few other glaciers including Sperry Glacier, also in Glacier Park, and the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Ice Fields of Banff National Park in Alberta Canada. Of course, whenever I have made these excursions, I have taken pictures, which have remained sequestered away in old photo albums or shoeboxes.
We discover the Binning mural in the upper floor of a drug store.
Poldi was not done with her “hidden treasures of Vancouver” list. The next one would take some sleuthing to locate. It was another architectural feature, this time a large mural crafted from Italian glass tiles that had been commissioned in the 1950s for the Imperial Bank of Canada to adorn the vast banking teller hall of their new building. The bank has long since moved out of the building and the magnificent space currently is being used by a drug store. Poldi knew the name of the drug store (“Shoppers Drug Mart”) but not its location, and this was a chain of stores that had many outlets.
Our inquiries at the hotel concierge desk were met with quizzical looks. No one seemed to know about the Binnings mosaic mural. B. C. Binning was a highly regarded artist in his day, but is not as well known now. But they could help locate the right store by making calls to each, and asking if their store had a mural in it. This didn’t really work. Everyone who answered seemed unaware of any mural.
So we decided to embark on our version of the traveling salesman problem. We would visit the nearby Shoppers Drug Mart stores (there were three or four within walking distance) and look for ourselves.
The moon sets behind an outdoor sculpture while auroras light the sky at Franconia Sculpture Park.
Even if light pollution were not an issue, we’d rarely see the northern lights because our latitude in Minneapolis is outside the normal auroral oval. But last week, Earth experienced a strong geomagnetic storm and we were suddenly in the middle of it! Here was a chance to see aurora without traveling to Alaska or Manitoba! And it was the perfect opportunity to photograph them with my wide-angle lenses, one of which I call my “Milky Way/aurora lens”, a 2-1/2-pound monster for just this purpose! But we needed to get away from the city lights.
There is a sculpture park, Franconia, that Poldi and I have enjoyed and contributed to for many years, and it was less than an hour from home. We arrived before sunset and sought permission to take photos, even after the normal park closing time. As I was scouting for locations and setting up tripods, a trickle of other visitors arrived with the same purpose: to see the predicted northern lights. As twilight faded, the aurora tourists expanded to dozens of vehicles, all of which had headlights that swept across the sculpture park grounds, interfering with my carefully selected compositions.
I have learned not to react to unexpected lighting situations. Oftentimes, they make for interesting photographic results. One of my favorite examples is when I was shooting reflections on a calm alpine lake and a group of partiers arrived and went skinnydipping, breaking up the smooth lake surface. Rather than close the shutter and move on, I kept it open for the duration of my planned exposure. It created a wonderful blend of reflected and scattered light!
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.
