This 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Alarm at 5:00. Poldi made coffee and we headed to the dunes for sunrise. We returned to the place we had found the previous night speculating where they might be illuminated at dawn. But now it was dark, and our hike was by “dead reckoning“. We couldn’t see them, and we hadn’t scouted them using GPS, so we just headed down the wash in the approximate direction. As we got closer, we could make them out in the gradually increasing twilight.
I wanted to capture the light on the dunes in a time lapse, so I set up the camera and tripod on the sand mound we had just climbed, and started the image capture sequence. I will have to make changes to the camera settings as daybreak approached, but there was now time to sit at the top of the dune next to Poldi, share the coffee, and watch the magic of sunrise as it brought light and color to a new day.
We could make out distant small figures on the dunes– like ants climbing a hill. Several groups would make their way along the dune crest lines, visiting each peak along the contours of sand. Eventually the sun burst over the mountain range to the east, and the sinuous shadows of the sand made a sharp contrast with the now sunlit crests. This was the visual reward for our early morning efforts. It was stunning.
“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).
The restored relay clock, in its original glass case
I have renovated the components of my nearly 50-year-old digital clock. The next step was to assemble it all back together. Would it actually work?
The old broken and abused internal plexiglass chassis was replaced by new plexiglass, providing an opportunity for me to learn the technique of plastic welding, where a syringe injects solvent into the edge of a surface-to-surface joint and spreads by capillary action to the full contact area, partially dissolving the plexiglass, which then forms new polymer bonds between the pieces. It takes a few minutes for it to start hardening, which gives some time to prop the parts in the desired position (use a square to get the angles right). It is completely cured in 24 hours and is truly “welded”. Like a good metal weld, a good plastic weld will break elsewhere if enough force is applied.
