In 2017 we hosted “Thor & Poldi’s Excellent Eclipse Party” for about a dozen friends and relatives. They recall fondly the time we spent on the banks of the Snake River at Heise Hot Springs campground, and the beautiful clear day at “Stinking Springs”, where we witnessed the sun turn into a hole in the sky. It was three minutes of an otherworldly sensation.
We decided to do it again for the 2024 eclipse. This begins a series of blog posts that describe that experience– the planning, the traveling, and the day of the eclipse. It is not a spoiler to let you know that clouds interfered with our plans, this is now meteorological history. But we were rewarded with all the pleasures and adventures of the journey, and the sharing of it with friends, old and new.
I will be adding bits to the story over the next few days and weeks. If you wish to subscribe and get the posts in your email, there is a signup link somewhere nearby.
Thor and Poldi’s Eclipse Party 2024 previous | beginning | next
“Death Valley Days” is the title of a long-running television series that I vaguely remember but did not watch. Now I wish I had. Thanks to my early-adopter dad, we had a small black-and-white television, the only kind available back then. It would have been just fine since the episodes were shot in black and white. There was no color in those days.
I have since had the pleasure of visiting Death Valley, several times. My first visit was in 1995, a brief weekend departure from a trade show that involved stealing a blanket from the hotel. I spent the night with it in my rental car, at Dante’s Overlook, which provided a bitter cold but spectacular view of sunrise on the Panamint Mountains across the valley.
I wrote about a more recent visit, experiencing the magic of Racetrack Playa, and I was excited to return this year and explore the park further. Over the next few essays, I’ll try to convey some of my experiences in this unique place on the planet.
If you enjoy this series of stories of Death Valley, I invite you to subscribe for future posts. They are not always about travel, but I try to keep them interesting.
Introduction In May, I made a solo road trip to Texas in order to do “reconnaissance” and to plan for the upcoming total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024. I had made similar explorations of the western states prior to the 2017 Great American Eclipse which turned out to be very helpful in preparing for it.
You may ask “why Texas?” It is not my usual road trip destination, but celestial mechanics is oblivious to human-drawn political maps. It is also oblivious to weather, so to optimize the likelihood of clear skies on eclipse day, we need to be as far south and west along the eclipse path as possible. Here is a chart of the cloud cover for the time in April along the eclipse path.
The various colors indicate the average cloud coverage at 2 p.m. Eastern time between April 3 and 13 based on ERA-Interim data from 1979 to 2016 collected by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF). (Dr. Brian Brettschneider)
I’m not sure if this chart represents how much of the sky is covered, or how often the sky is covered, but it is apparent that Mexico is the best place to observe the eclipse. Not eager to drive through Mexico, I am limiting the search to the US, which takes us to… Texas.
It turns out that the eclipse path runs through a pleasant part of south central Texas known as “Hill Country,” that contrasts with its flatter or harsher or more urban or more desolate areas. For Texans, it is the equivalent of what Minnesotans call “Up North”, a place to escape the city, or to relax on vacation. To me, it is not quite as nice as the North Woods, but I may be biased.
As I said, Texas is not my usual road trip destination. I have not been to the state for decades, and, having observed Texas politics from afar, I am a bit intimidated. But eclipse-viewing is something that can be enjoyed regardless of political view, so I packed up some observing gear and headed south.
In the next series of blog posts, I’ll describe what I encountered along the way. If you enjoy my travelogues, or if you just want to glean information that might be relevant to your 2024 eclipse plans, I invite you to subscribe (meaning that you will get an email notification when I publish a blog entry).
About a year ago, with some reluctance, I put my motorcycle up for sale. I had acquired it more than a decade before as one of those midlife attempts to try and recapture the free wheeling spirit I remembered from college, when I had a small Honda motorcycle that I used mostly to commute to school.
My midlife motorcycle was a large touring bike, a BMW, and it offered an experience beyond just getting from point A to B in order to attend class or purchase groceries. It offered that open air riding experience only possible from a two-wheeled vehicle, whose balance and stability derives from the thrilling lean into the curves of the road.
Although I had imagined taking it on extended trips to remote roads in scenic places, the realities of life worked against those dreams. Instead, I found nice motorcycle-friendly roads closer to home and made many weekend afternoon excursions to enjoy them.
In recent years I have seen a degradation of driving skills displayed by the cars around me, primarily due to distractions of phones and screens. There has also been a decline in driver courtesy, possibly a side effect of the covid pandemic. In these same years, I also noticed that my ability to confidently maneuver the heavy touring bike has declined. I always felt that one should not own a bike that you can’t get back up should it fall, and I suspected that, while the bike was no heavier, my lifting strength is less than it once was.
All of these factors resulted in a growing feeling of insecurity, especially in traffic or at freeway speeds alongside other vehicles. While I always try to be in a defensive driving mindset, anticipating potentially hazardous situations with the flow of traffic, I was now bothered by thoughts of the possibilities of not surviving the ride. This really detracted from the unique pleasures of being on a motorcycle.
I decided to retire from motorcycle riding. I sold my bike to a BMW-riding pastor from Rochester who wanted the exact year and model I was offering. He would have preferred blue, but was happy with silver. I told him he looked good on that color.
And so, another life chapter ends. I’m sad to no longer be slipping into that natural fitting position on the saddle behind the fairing, feeling the vibration of a powerful engine, the thrill of acceleration, and leaning into the curves, but I recognize that this is the right time to move on, and I’m glad that someone else gets to enjoy the experience.
I did manage to have one extended motorcycle trip—The Lake Superior Circle Tour, and I was accompanied by my intrepid partner Poldi, riding pillion. I made a series of facebook updates at the time describing the adventures along the way, which I will be reprising here in the next series of posts. Some of you may recall them from three years back. Whether they are new to you or not, enjoy these recollections of a summer adventure during a time before covid.
The mountain range that hosts the Matanuska Glacier, one of many spectacular vistas we encountered (click for full size).
I recall as a young child my dad claiming that he had visited all 48 states. I was quite impressed. I wondered if I would ever be able to ever match that accomplishment.
My dad had the advantage of being the son of a professor whose research and world war II assignments took him nearly everywhere. Later, in the home that my parents made, travel was not mandated by an employer, rather, it was actively pursued to expand the experiences of their children.
And it did. We visited many states on our summer vacation travels and gained an awareness of their local distinctions. But some were beyond our range, including Alaska. I have not been there until just now, this year, 2022. It has been a wonderful addition to my catalogue of states visited.
I had no schematic and my memories were vague, but I recalled that there had been three types of relays, all operating at different voltages, which made for a complicated arrangement of relay contacts and coil terminals. There was yet another voltage involved in lighting up the display. I wanted to figure out how I had managed all this complexity back when I barely understood power supplies, and then figure out how to renovate it, with the least amount of re-wiring.
As I went about tracing wires, confirming contacts with an ohm-meter, I gradually built up a re-understanding of how the relays were interconnected. Some of the wires had broken and so I could only guess their destinations. I eventually figured out how the three different relay types managed to propagate the time signal from one level to the next. As I worked on this, there were more than a few times when I wondered “how could this have ever worked?”
Alan Holden in his studio with shelves of his creations, ca 1970
I have long been intrigued by geometric patterns. As a teenager I made models of various polygons and polyhedra and learned the rules for constructing geodesic domes. A book that held my fascination for years was “Shapes, Space, and Symmetry” by Alan Holden.
The ability for computers to represent 3D objects and to realistically render them, to interact with them, and to display them in 3D was years in the future; in the 1970s, physical models were essential for teaching geometric principles and understanding crystal structures. The author, a physicist and chemist, had crafted a lifetime of such models and described them in his book. I could not match the patience and skill required to make his beautiful and complex cardboard models.
Also in the 1970s, Roger Penrose, the British mathematician and scientific colleague of Stephen Hawking, investigated an arcane branch of geometry to answer the question of whether an infinite plane can be tiled with a set of shapes that did not overlap, have gaps, or repeat. He found that the answer was yes, it was possible, and he discovered several sets of shapes that could do it. The first set included pentagons, stars, “boats” and diamonds. The second set was simpler, it needed only two shapes called kites and darts. The third was simpler yet, a pair of rhombuses, skinny and fat parallelograms with equal length sides. These sets of shapes, P1, P2, and P3 are known as “Penrose tiles”.
I’m not going to explain the mathematical concepts behind them, even if I could, but I will call attention to their esthetic beauty, which you can find by a simple Google search. Penrose tiles became popularized by Martin Gardner’s famous Mathematical Games column in Scientific American in 1977, and suddenly everybody was making Penrose patterns out of them. Penrose was able to patent the shapes, which were subsequently licensed for games and puzzles. He famously won a lawsuit against a company that used their non-repeating feature to prevent their embossed toilet paper from sticking on the roll!
When presented with the “canvas” of the floor in my newly renovated screen porch, I immediately wondered how best to cover it. I really liked the idea of ceramic tiles, impervious to rain and snow, and then realized this floor could be a host to the mathematical beauty of Penrose tiles!
I researched the idea. There were Penrose tilings in public spaces, famously at Texas A&M and more locally, Carleton College. I also encountered individuals who had made such patterns in their private homes. I learned that this was not a project for the wing-it, make-it-fit crowd; the tile shapes needed to be cut to thousandth-inch precision. I considered what was needed to cut ceramic tiles to this precision and decided to look at other options, the first of which was to make precision cuts of plywood panels with beautiful wood veneers. Perhaps a laser cutter could mark and cut wood tiles to the necessary precision.
A chorus of my technically and construction-astute friends warned me against this plan—the plywood edges would respond to the outdoor conditions by curling up or down in response to temperature and moisture changes.
So I went on to evaluate other materials, and re-discovered the appeal of “luxury vinyl tile”, a heavy duty version of vinyl flooring. Within this category was “marmoleum” a natural mix of linseed oil and other natural ingredients, a modern linoleum. I found that it was offered in tile plank sizes that could be trimmed into Penrose tile shapes!
I now had a medium, but needed a pattern. Penrose tiling is not quite as simple as laying the tiles down wherever they fit. In order to tile the plane, with no overlaps and no gaps, one must follow the “edge matching rules”. By matching the edges, the tiling that results will ensure that the plane will be perfectly covered. To help accomplish this, tiles are marked in such a way that adjacent tiles will be placed according to the edge matching rules.
I wanted to make a scale mock-up of the floor pattern. I tried some of the online Penrose tile patterns, printed them out, and cut multiple copies. The paper-thin substrate, scissors-cut by hand, were not very successful. They didn’t lay flat or align well and were easily disturbed by any slight breeze or sneeze.
I discovered an alternative. An Etsy store of homemade wooden toys that included among their catalog of rocking horses and train cars, a set of laser-engraved, wooden Penrose tiles, beautifully crafted, sanded and finished, in either P2 or P3 shapes, all in a handy home-sewn carrying bag! I ordered one set each from Wooden Giraffe Toys and had them within a few days! I immediately started making aperiodic five-fold symmetric tilings from them to get a feel of what the floor might look like.
The front of the tiles had the edge-matching rule markings, but the backsides were a solid contrasting color. Once the pattern was confirmed by the front markings, individual tiles could be flipped to create the visual pattern I sought.
Now that I have a Penrose tile pattern to my liking, I need to figure out how to actually make the tiles and install them.
A pattern of wooden Penrose rhombuses made from the set offered by Wooden Giraffe Toys. I don’t consider them toys; they are tools!
Mars over Mittens, Twilight at Monument Valley Nov 1, 2005, Monument Valley AZ Pentax 6×7, Provia 400, 30 sec at f/3.5
I have long been fascinated by the landscapes of the southwest, and in particular the peculiar rock formations found in Monument Valley, a unique area straddling Arizona and Utah. I am not the only one that finds them intriguing: it is a very popular photographic and film-making target.
When a business trip took me to a conference in Phoenix, I
decided to prepend a personal trip to this Navajo Nation Tribal Park to take pictures
of the night sky. My plans were
ambitious; I wanted to take wide angle star trail photos featuring the famous
buttes, but also, knowing how remote and dark this area would be, to take
guided astrophotos of some deep sky targets.
