Septuagenarian Surprise

Hiking through the desert in the morning after an overnight photo session.

“Can I still do it?” and “Will I still enjoy it?”

I find myself asking these two questions about various activities I undertake.  Now maybe you are thinking I am making oblique references to sex, but so far, that hasn’t been in the category of activities I am questioning. 

I noticed that, after turning 70, my superpowers appeared to be diminishing.  This was a surprise to me because so far, at every decade mark, I had felt little difference from the previous one.  There were a few things I suppose– certainly my appearance has changed as I have grayed, but for the most part, my capabilities have held.  

Until now.  I am starting to notice that my flexibility is less; I am stiff in the morning; my strength and stamina are diminished.  Something has happened to the sinew and grit that powered my younger self.  The analogy I entertain is:  “the rubber bands are drying out”.  

My limitations became apparent in a recent outing to take pictures of the night sky, an activity I have enjoyed for decades.  One of my life highlights was recording pictures of the night sky on Racetrack Playa in Death Valley a few years ago.  Currently, it is a similar trip with a hike to a collection of geologic features in the badlands of New Mexico.  I treated it like many others I had undertaken, but this time, things felt different.

During my “Nightscape Odyssey” in 2001, I would survey a candidate night sky site during the day, making notes of how to get there, what compositions were promising, and generally getting familiar with the area.  I would then return to the site later, as twilight approached, or sometimes even in the dark, and set up my telescopes and cameras.  It made for a long day, and a long night, and I was usually exhausted the next morning.  Nevertheless, after a morning nap, I would start the process all over again for the next night’s session.

This time, I was prematurely worn down after the initial reconnaissance and had to postpone the nighttime excursion until the next day.  I didn’t expect that.  Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the elevation, but those were factors before, and back then I still had the energy to carry on.

The lure of an image in your mind’s eye is a strong motivation, and I was very excited to see if I could capture the Milky Way behind the Alien Throne, my target for this outing.  I described the overall experience previously, but I will now describe some of my other reactions as I undertook it.

I mentioned that my backpack was heavier than I expected.  Yes, it had an excess of camera gear, but that was the payload.  The rest was support: water, snacks, and protection against the desert night.  The total came close to forty pounds, a typical number for a much longer trip.  It was well within the range of packs I had carried before, and tonight I only had to go 1-1/2 miles over relatively flat terrain.  I put it on, cinched the hip belt, and felt the familiar shift of my center of gravity as I took the first steps down the trail.  It felt good to be doing this again.

As I continued, I noticed that I could feel the load in my legs.  This was not a daypack.  I could also sense some strain on my knees.  This reminded me of an incident that happened a previous time I had carried this pack.

It was fifteen years ago.  I had been on a weeklong backpacking trip, and on the last day, while climbing a ridge along the Lake Superior Hiking Trail, I experienced a sudden collapse of my right knee.  It was truly a surprise; I fell to the ground.  It wasn’t painful, my leg was just uselessly limp.  My hiking buddies helped me back to my feet, but I couldn’t sustain the weight of the pack and collapsed again. Fortunately, it was only a short distance to our destination, and by distributing most of my load to the others, we were able to get there.

But here I was, hiking solo in a wilderness area as night approached.  If the same thing happened, what would I do?  I was a mile from my car, but to get there, I would have to abandon my load:  $5000 of camera gear.  Well, I guess I should factor that into my choice to embark on these excursions!

I carried on.  And I carried the hiking poles that Poldi had lent me.  I had always considered them a nuisance, getting in the way of my path and interfering with handling a camera, but I was now starting to appreciate them.  They bore my weight and guided my traverse across the ruts and ridges in this rugged landscape.  What was once an annoyance has now become a dependence.

I made it to the Valley of Dreams, following the route I had traveled the previous day, but the Alien Throne was another half mile through uncharted ridges and eroded gullies.  I could see the destination on my GPS, but the terrain was not adequately shown.  I found myself blocked by box canyons and cliffs.  My strength was waning, the sun was setting, and I wondered how many more of these obstacles I could clamber over.  If I became stuck, I would just make the best of things, taking pictures of whatever features were around me, even if they weren’t my prime target.  It could still be a wonderful evening.

I was getting close, but a sudden drop-off was in the way.  It was too high to scramble down, especially bearing my pack.  So I removed the pack, lowered it over the edge, and then eased myself over and dropped down onto it.  This was the last obstacle.  I rounded the corner and found the Alien Throne!  But it was not lost on me that this was an obstacle that in earlier days would not have presented a challenge.  Further, had I not had a semi-graceful landing on my pack, what injuries would I have sustained?

It was a small barrier, but I was stranded on the shelf 5-feet above the valley floor I needed to get to.  I dropped the pack and eased myself over the edge onto it.

I filed those thoughts away as I looked over the theater containing the Alien Throne.  I needed some time to recover my breath after the stress and strain of navigating these eroded features, but I was aware that the light was rapidly changing.  I needed to get my cameras set up.

This is a very pleasurable part of the adventure.  I am finally at the site and can look for the compositions I have imagined.  It is a mix of guidance and guesswork.  I have some tools to help with orientation and timing, but it really takes placing an eye to the eyepiece to see how the landscape fits the sky.  There are technical issues to resolve as well: exposure times, lens apertures, focus, and shutter intervals.  These keep me narrowly focused on my goals and shut out any other concerns (I’m oblivious of the need to worry about scorpions).

But as I placed each camera and tripod in its place, I could not help but notice each difficult position, and each awkward angle I had to assume in doing so.  Yes, the terrain is uneven, and the viewpoint requires the right height and angle, whatever it needs to be for the composition, but I don’t remember it being such a physical strain to achieve it.  

Kneeling is a particular motion, required for just about any adjustment.  I find that it is hard to get back up.  And when I drop something, it becomes a major project to recover it.  The aches and pains of drying rubber bands were making themselves known in this otherwise pleasurable setting.

But when the cameras are each in place and running, I heave a sigh and settle in for a night of watching the heavens flow across the sky.  It will be an hour or more before the cameras need attention.  This is another pleasant part of the nightscape adventure.  I record the photographic details of my experiments in a notebook and contemplate what the outcomes might be, and what subsequent exposure tests I should undertake.  When I am with Poldi, we find spiritual and intimate activities to fill the time under the stars, but on this night I am alone, at least for a while.  Soon after my cameras were set up, another night sky photographer arrives.  We share our stories while the stars move above us.

We eventually retreat to our refuge against the cold desert night.  I am in a sleeping bag tucked into a recess in the rocks.  I relax here, watching the sky above and listening.  There is a cricket chirping.  I am astounded at how loud it is, and then I remember, I now have “bionic ears,” recently acquired hearing aids, another indicator of crossing the seven-decade threshold.  They have been tuned to amplify the high frequencies that I was previously missing.  This helps me to understand the speech of women and children, but it really helps me to notice the frequency of cricket chirps, which are slowing as the temperature drops.  The chirps keep me awake.

But eventually they stop, or maybe I drift off.  When my alarm goes off for the next exposure event, I climb out of the sleeping bag and stumble toward the camera that needs attention.  The moon has set, and it is now purely starlight that guides me.  Plus my flashlight, because starlight is just not enough, at least on this uneven terrain.  As I navigate over the rocks toward the camera, I recognize the precariousness of my path.  At home, at night, in the dark, I must sometimes navigate to the bathroom.  It is much easier with a nightlight– so we have installed them.  Here, in the certified dark sky wilderness of New Mexico, I am on my own.  I am aware and notice the uncertainty of my steps on the sandstone terrain.  Loose gravel and vegetation contribute to the hazard.  Once again, I recognized that if I fell and was injured on one of these camera servicing missions, I would no longer be enjoying the night.

But the cameras, with their new exposure settings and refreshed batteries, continue their nighttime schedule.  I return to my nook to marvel at the Milky Way, now high in the sky.  The cricket reminded me that I have bionic ears, but the sky reminds me that I also have enhanced eyesight.  

The miracles of modern optics can correct for obscure vision conditions, including astigmatism and other aberrations.  I put on my progressive prescription glasses so that I could appreciate the full glory of the night sky, beyond my now compromised seventy-year-old built-in lenses.  It was a bust.  For whatever reason, my glasses made the view worse, not better.  I will be investigating this failure, but in the meantime, I enjoyed the night sky without optical assistance.

The pleasures of the night continued; the cameras were serviced despite the risks, and eventually the sky began to lighten.  Dawn was approaching.  

The exposure schedule ended as the sun rose, and I gathered my equipment, preparing for the hike back. The night before, I had reached my destination just before my strength ran out.  Now, after a night to recover, I expected an easy hike.  I knew the way.  And it started that way, but soon became hard.

It was not a difficult trail, mostly level.  And the sun was still low, the temperature moderate.  The path was easy, but on encountering the slight banks in and out of a dry creek wash, I was annoyed that I could not just scramble them; I had to take carefully placed steps.

Only a mile and a half back to my car.  Yet, I found my feet becoming “heavy”, without the lift to rise ever slightly for the next step.  And they were sloppily planted in that next step.  It was the closest thing to a stagger, and I realized it.

So I paused for a rest, dropping my pack for a while.  Sitting on a rock and taking some water, one of my hiking poles fell to the ground.  I cursed.  Now I would have to bend over to get it.  When did just stooping down become such a pain?  I have never enjoyed getting under the desk to plug in computer or power cables, but just bending over to pick up something I dropped?  That’s new.

Reaching the point of involuntarily dragging my feet was a new experience, a physical regime I was unfamiliar with.  It made me appreciate the limits that people sometimes overcome, not just for recreation, but for survival.

And it added to my list of items to balance against the pleasures of my remote outings.  I really enjoyed the hours in the desert monitoring cameras and watching the galaxy cross the sky.  But I have become aware of the risks I am taking on, some of which seem to have increased over my years.

I was halfway back.  I was aware of the remaining distance, which was more than the physical distance.  It included the depletion of my energy reserves.  I may have been staggering, but I was not to the point of stopping.  I hoisted the pack and continued back to the car.

I can now declare that “I can still do it”, and I will also declare that “I still enjoy it”, but I must temper this last statement by acknowledging that the enjoyment is diminished by the increased risks I take on.

Life is filled with tradeoffs.

It may seem that I am complaining about getting old, and I guess I am, but I am also thrilled that I am still around to do so.


My motivation, an image in my mind’s eye becomes real (click for full resolution).

If I look back a little, I might be able to extrapolate how this next decade will go.  So far so good.  I hope I can be as spry as Dick Van Dyke when I get there!

Daily Doses of Distress

I find the news these days to be very distressing; I’m surprised by how many things being enacted by our leaders seem to contradict the values I was raised with.  So I retreat to the world of what’s real, which to me is the world of Nature and the physical laws and relationships it embodies.  

Science and math are incredibly powerful tools.  Despite their unpopularity, their predictive abilities are unrivaled.  So I use them to assess the world around me, and recently I have been exploring the limits of our cultural assumption of unlimited growth.  Unfortunately, I find that we are reaching those limits, and I suspect that our current political conflicts may be related to them.

I don’t want this blog to become dominated by such heavy material, so I will simply reference the next essay, Defending Malthus, in my “limits” series, for those who find them interesting.  

Everyone else can hold tight.  I’m on my way to New Mexico, hoping to hike the Bisti Badlands again and take some photos.  That is what will keep my attention away from the daily dose of discouraging news.

On Unlimited Growth

Many of you follow my eclectic blog posts hoping that one of them might appeal to you.  They span a broad range from personal to professional, craft to art, simplistic to technical, worldly to cosmic.  I sometimes offer my opinions and back them up with data.  In today’s data-challenged world (not from a dearth of data, but rather the challenges from those who don’t like the data), it is hard to make a compelling argument.

Nevertheless, I recently embarked on exploring a topic that has always bothered me:  the idea that we can solve our problems by economic growth.  I can see how it can solve certain short term problems, like borrowing money to pay back interest on prior loans, but it didn’t seem like a viable long term strategy.  We live on a finite planet and so eventually we would end up against practical physical limitations, right?

It is obvious to a physicist, but seemingly not to many others.

Over the last month, while staying warm in our natural gas-heated home, I looked into the future of fossil fuels and their impact on our global economy.  I crafted three essays which are more technical than many of my posts, and may not be of interest to many of my followers.  So don’t feel compelled to digest them.  

But if you are curious, here are brief descriptions, with links.

Continue reading

Cloud Chamber Update

I still don’t have a reliable setup, but some recent changes I made to my cloud chamber have resulted in this very satisfying display of subatomic contrails.  Here are a couple of recordings.  The first documents when I was stunned to see multiple concurrent trails and I called for Poldi to witness it.

“Hey Poldi!” (expand to see what we were excited about).

The second video is a sustained view for several minutes, placed to background music, to mesmerize those of us who are susceptible. Think about it. This is a visual representation of the radiation that is all around us! Expand to full screen for best effect.

If you’d like to read about how I got here, the previous post describes the project of building the cloud chamber.


Cloud Chambers and Balloons

A view looking directly down in my cloud chamber showing a fragment of uranium glass.  A small white streak pointing to 11:00 appears above it, which is a track of some subatomic particle, possibly an alpha particle from a radioactive decay within the glass. (Click to enlarge).

Years ago, after watching some YouTube videos on making cloud chambers, I tried my hand.  A cloud chamber is one of the earliest techniques to see the paths of subatomic particles.  It turns out that there is a natural background radiation of them and I wanted to see if I could watch these particles as they whizz around us.  It seemed like a cool experiment.

The analogy I like to use is of a high altitude jet leaving a condensation trail behind it.  You can see the contrail, but not the jet making it.  In a cloud chamber, similar condensation physics is at work, but instead of engine exhaust, it is the particle’s ionization of gas molecules that triggers the condensation.  The original Wilson cloud chambers used water vapor; modern chambers use alcohol, which is more easily managed.

My attempt to make one was less than satisfying.  I recall staring at the mist at the bottom of the container and imagining that I was seeing patterns of droplets. Maybe I did, but it was not the thrilling experience of seeing the invisible that I was hoping for.  I put the project aside.  Until recently.

Continue reading

The Universe in 3D

I always had a mild interest in astronomy, and it became a strong interest in the 1990s, triggered by a homework assignment given to my ten-year-old son to go out at night and identify some constellations.  I took him away from the city lights to a park where we could see the stars emerge from twilight.  On that beautiful fall evening, we found the constellations he was looking for, and we also saw Jupiter, the brightest object in the sky.  Through binoculars, we were surprised that we could see its moons.  This caused me to wonder what else I might be able to see if I were to look a little closer.

Continue reading

A New Host for Thor’s Life Notes

I started this blog when I retired in 2019, just before COVID.  It was an activity that occupied me during those months of quarantine and allowed me to share my interests and projects.  I was, and still am, ignorant of blogging technology.  Yes, I have, in my career, written code for the world of web pages and browser-based applications, but every time I did so, I wondered, “How could this ever work?”  It struck me as a house of cards, with fragile links and unreliable and inconsistent page renderings.  

Continue reading

The Twins Paradox – a lifelong puzzle

When I was studying physics in college, one of the early subjects was Einstein’s special relativity theory.  The subject is called “relativity” because it explains the physics of objects moving relative to each other.  It is “special” because it only applies to uniform relative motion, not motion induced by gravity, which is covered by “general” relativity, which Einstein described a decade later.

Special relativity replaced Galileo’s and Isaac Newton’s earlier theories, which were superb at explaining falling objects and orbiting planets, but had run into trouble explaining the properties of fast-moving electrons and light.

It is an early subject in the physics curriculum because as students, we were just learning the techniques of calculus and linear algebra; techniques that are helpful, but not required to understand special relativity.  Most people are familiar with special relativity, and even if they don’t understand the details, they have heard “E=mc2”, one of the consequences of it.  They may also have heard about time dilation, the effect of a moving clock slowing down relative to a stationary one.

Continue reading

Franconia Aurora

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!

Continue reading

Eclipse Party 2024– cloud coverup

Eclipse dress rehearsal in my back yard.

When I was first learning astrophotography, I had the bad luck of beginner’s luck. I got an early good result, a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, and then spent years discovering all the things that can go wrong with this technical hobby.

The equipment has improved immensely since those days of making long duration, manually guided exposures onto film, but the opportunities for fatal mistakes has not seemed to diminish, and the challenges of solar imaging are no less demanding than those of deep sky imaging– just different.

So I knew that I needed to practice my plan to photograph the solar eclipse. There were too many things that all needed to go right, and too many opportunities to make a mistake.

Continue reading