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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Our group consumes coffee! Five French presses were hard pressed to keep up.
Eclipse Monday arrived and we proceeded as planned. Delicious French-pressed coffee and cinnamon rolls greeted our eclipse party guests, but the sky was covered in intermittent clouds, a mix of high and low layers, only occasionally offering a clear sunny view.
This did not seem to affect the group. They proceeded to continue their exploration of the campground and vicinity, logging birdcalls and trekking new hiking trails.
By the time the eclipse started, a little past noon, we all convened at our observing site. Cabin H, it turns out, is the only cabin at Zuber’s that had a full view of Old Baldy, and it provided us with a perfect open area in front to view the eclipsed sun!
I had completed the setup of my cameras (more on this later). In principle, they were automated enough that I could relax and enjoy the show with my friends. I looked around and saw that our full group of black t-shirted eclipse observers had positioned their camp chairs to claim their personal view of the sky, making guesses about the sun’s location as it occasionally peeked through the clouds. Some had binoculars, properly filtered of course, and their punched name cards were near at hand.
Over on top of Old Baldy we could see the silhouettes of many people who had climbed it– to get a closer look, I guess. When they started striking odd poses and making wild gestures, I realized this was the gathering spot for the Wiccans and Druids. And sure enough, whenever the clouds presented an opening that showed a partially eclipsed sun, they could be heard whooping and hollering at it!
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.
Our plans came together well. We were worried about bringing all that we needed to host a group of 17 and worried it would all fit in our vehicle. But then, as it seemed we were ready to go a full day ahead of time, we worried that we must be forgetting something. I never have my stuff together by the scheduled departure! What was I missing? Well, we decided to leave as planned anyway– we’d figure it out later if we needed to. But isn’t that how all trips start? It was just the lack of rushed panic at the end of packing that was missing.
My friend Rich traveled to Texas as a passenger in a caravan that included more friends, John and Karen, and friends of friends Jennelle and Mike. John is a professor emeritus of environmental engineering, but I think if he wasn’t, he’d be a long-haul trucker. He insisted on driving the full distance, no sharing the wheel with other potential driving shifts. Stopping for gas was a necessary interruption, but stopping for a meal was lost time entirely– they could eat sandwiches on the road. They made the trip from Minneapolis to Zuber’s in two days. I’m glad to be in a different caravan.
Rich arrives at Zuber’s with his descriptively labeled beer, just for the occasion.Continue reading →
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.
