Instrument Troubleshooting
Cosmic ray instruments are complex and it seems there is always something that needs adjusting or fixing or calibrating, and then testing and confirming and re-calibrating. This is what consumed our time while waiting for the wind to die down. And it is a good thing to have had that time to do those last ground tests, because we encountered a troubling condition—an intermittent false trigger.
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Scientific balloon launches have been part of NASA’s mission for over 30 years, but in 1977, they were conducted by NCAR– the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR maintained a balloon launching facility in Texas that had all of the equipment and resources to support experiments like ours. Unfortunately, Texas was too far south for our experiment. Instead, we would be operating from makeshift facilities in Aberdeen, a town of 25,000 in an area of South Dakota that offered low population, but enough infrastructure to meet our technical and launch requirements.
There was a regional airport outside of town, and an airplane hangar was provided to house our laboratory field station. We were not the only researchers, however. Groups from other universities were also trying to measure the properties of cosmic rays. We each had a section of the hangar to set up and prepare our experiments for launch. After packing up our instrument and all the essential support equipment from our 4th-floor lab in the Physics building into a rental truck and driving a day west on Highway 12, we arrived in Aberdeen. It took us several more days to recreate an operational cosmic ray field lab in the airplane hangar.
Continue readingThis is the beginning of a series of posts that describe the launching of a scientific balloon experiment in 1977. The story was reconstructed after encountering some old photos from that event. Reminiscences can run rather long, so I have partitioned it into more manageable segments. I hope you enjoy this snapshot of the scientific and cultural times of the 1970s.
Background
While attending the University of Minnesota, one of my part-time jobs was as a lab assistant in the Physics and Astronomy Department. I worked in a laboratory dedicated to the cosmic ray research group led by professors Phyllis Freier and C J (Jake) Waddington. In the group were lab manager Chuck Gilman and graduate student Bob Scarlett who were preparing an instrument to be launched and held aloft by a balloon to gather data about cosmic rays, a (still) mysterious radiation of high energy particles from deep outer space.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
Continue readingI 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.
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