A Look Back at Ten Years of Geotripping: Dealing with the Dangerous Rays of Death

One of the greatest thrills of digital cameras is how easily they allow the documentation of celestial events. A 60x zoom is telescope grade, and yet is available on cameras costing less than $400. My history with digital cameras began 18 years ago, and their versatility has allowed me to document a large number of astronomical and meteorological phenomena. 2017 was a culmination as I was able to be in place to witness the total eclipse of the sun in August. But leading up to that day, I had put together a post of the what were to me the most fascinating sky events of my life so far. That post appeared on August 3 of last year...

Dealing with the Dangerous Rays of Death: Singular Solar Events I've Seen

Do you ever look at the sun?

Some advice: DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN! You can destroy your eyes!

Good, now that we have that out of the way, what is this post all about? The sun has been on my mind the last few days. I'm preparing for the final adventure of the summer, and it has a lot to do with the sun, most specifically, the only eclipse to cross the lower 48 states since 1979, the first to cross the country in 99 years, and the last to cross the American West until 2045. I got to thinking about the singular events that I've seen over the years that involve the sun in some way or another.

The sun. A diameter of about 860,000 miles, more than 100 times the diameter of the Earth. About 93,000,000 miles away from Earth. Big enough to hold 330,000 Earths. Containing 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. The source of energy that makes life possible on Earth.

The most obvious moments that we might pay attention to the sun are during sunrise and sunset. Every one is different and unique. At those times, the sun is at eye level, and the thickness (and dirtiness) of the atmosphere provide a bit of protection for viewing with the unprotected eye. As the sun passes across the horizon, light is split into bright colors of the spectrum, providing a beautiful spectacle. I've probably taken thousands of sunset and sunrise pictures over the years, but here are two of my favorites, a sunset in Newport California a few years ago (above), and sunrise over Lake Rotorua in New Zealand in 2004 (below). To this day I cannot keep straight my internal compass; I couldn't help but think the sun was rising in the west (it wasn't). Lake Rotorua is one of the world's rare geothermal regions with geysers. Hot springs in the lake account for the steam rising off the water.

A difficult phenomena to see related to sunsets is the green flash. It is a sudden flash of greenish light above the sun at the moment of sunset, and it is said to last only a second or so. As the sun dips into the horizon, the layers of the atmosphere will cause some of the sunlight to be refracted, with red and orange on the lower parts of the disk along with green (and rarely blue) across the top.

It takes some very specific circumstances to see the flash, a clear view to a distant horizon, most often along coastlines. I have relatives on the coast of Oregon, so I've had a fair number of chances to try and capture the moment. I may even have succeeded once or twice.

Rainbows are one of the most familiar optical effects associated with the sun. Most everyone has seen them, so it takes some unique circumstances to really set one apart from others. My favorite moment came with a monsoonal storm on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon last year. I was looking down at a rainbow in the depths of the canyon.

Rainbows involve the splitting of white light from the sun into its component colors of the spectrum. Caves and deep slot canyons provide another sort of splitting, that of the sun's energy into a more or less pinhole of light. I was exploring a lava tube in the Mojave National Preserve a few years back. It was dark inside, but there were a few small skylights, and the early afternoon sun came bursting through like a blast from alien phaser.

One of the more famous places to see beams of light from the sun is in Antelope Canyon, Arizona. A deep slot canyon, Antelope is one of the most popular tourist stops on the Navajo Nation. The sandstone canyon is more than 100 feet deep, and only a few feet wide at the top. One can actually jump across if it were allowed. Tours are offered all day, but one pays a premium around noon for the obvious reason that it's when the sun sends beams of light into the depths of the canyon.

The effect is truly spectacular, although one should be aware that as lonely as these pictures seem, I was shoulder to shoulder with other photographers snapping like crazy.

Another fascinating phenomena occurs when the Moon passes into the Earth's shadow, a lunar eclipse. They are not rare, happening around two times a year, and they can be seen simultaneously across the globe (as long as the moon is visible in the sky). 

Lunar eclipses are fascinating to watch, and it is surprising to realize just how much of the sun's light is reflected from the moon. At totality, the moon practically disappears except for some refracted light around the edge of the Earth. Hundreds of stars become visible that weren't there moments earlier.

In a ridiculous age when science has to convince some people that the Earth is not actually flat, a lunar eclipse can help. The Earth casts a circular shadow across the surface of the Moon.

And then there is the opposite number, those events that result from the Moon passing in front of the Sun, a Solar eclipse. Although the Sun is many times larger than the Moon, the Moon is much closer to the earth, and is thus big enough to blot out the sun entirely. Solar eclipses are rarer than Lunar eclipses, and total solar eclipses are rarer still. I've been able to photograph a number of partial Solar eclipses over the years. For me, it is a clumsy affair, trying to hold a filter over the lens while keeping the Sun in the frame, but I've surrendered to the use of a tripod a few times to make it work.

The picture above is one of my favorites because of the huge sunspots that were present during the Moon's transit across the disc of the Sun. If the eclipse occurs when the Moon is farther from the Earth (it has an elliptical orbit), an annular eclipse can occur, in which the Moon doesn't cover the entire disc of the sun. I caught the picture below in 2012.

And then there are the transits of the planets. These happen when a planet crosses the disk of the Sun. Only two planets can do this, Mercury and Venus, because they are the only planets with orbits that are closer to the Sun than Earth. I've witnessed two of them.

A transit of the planet Mercury took place in May of 2016. I almost missed it because of cloud cover, but they cleared enough for a couple of shots. There was a sunspot as well. In the picture below, the top arrow points to a sunspot. The lower arrow points to Mercury. It is a small planet, only barely bigger than the Moon, and it orbits much closer to the Sun. Such transits are only visible by binocular or telescope (with filters, of course).

Zooming in made Mercury a bit clearer (below). Transits of Mercury are not overly rare, occurring in 1999, 2003, 2006, and 2016. Another will take place in November of 2019, but then we will need to wait until 2032 to see another.

The rarest Sun-related event I've ever seen is a transit of the planet Venus. The one I witnessed happened in 2012 (below). Previous transits had been in 1874, 1882, and 2004. The next will not happen until 2117 (in December, if you are planning on watching).

The big event of all things Solar is of course a total Solar eclipse. As noted above, it's been decades since one took place in the lower 48 states, and next won't cross my neck of the woods until 2045. I'll be almost 90 years old if I make it that far. I've had the privilege of witnessing one, though, in 1991. It crossed the south end of Baja California at San Jose del Cabo. A small expedition from MJC drove the length of the Baja Peninsula to see the event, one of the great adventures of my life. I didn't get pictures at the time, as the best technology I had was a Kodak Instamatic. The pictures below are from Dr. William Luebke, MJC's retired astronomy professor.

There is nothing quite like the few moments of totality. The sky goes dark, stars and planets become visible, and the ambient temperature plummets (it was summer when we were there, and the temperature dropped from over 100 degrees to 80 or less; it was a relief). The corona of the sun becomes visible, and there may be solar prominences visible as well. We had more than four minutes of totality, more than usual.

It's going to be a zoo in Oregon in a few weeks, as literally millions of people are converging on the region to have a look at this rare event. We will be staying about an hour's drive from the path of totality, so I have no idea if we'll be able to even get to the dark zone through the gridlocked traffic. If we do, I'll be busy getting pictures to share, and if we don't...well...we'll always have Baja.

Dealing with the Dangerous Rays of Death: Singular Solar Events I've Seen

Do you ever look at the sun?

Some advice: DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN! You can destroy your eyes!

Good, now that we have that out of the way, what is this post all about? The sun has been on my mind the last few days. I'm preparing for the final adventure of the summer, and it has a lot to do with the sun, most specifically, the only eclipse to cross the lower 48 states since 1979, the first to cross the country in 99 years, and the last to cross the American West until 2045. I got to thinking about the singular events that I've seen over the years that involve the sun in some way or another.

The sun. A diameter of about 860,000 miles, more than 100 times the diameter of the Earth. About 93,000,000 miles away from Earth. Big enough to hold 330,000 Earths. Containing 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. The source of energy that makes life possible on Earth.

The most obvious moments that we might pay attention to the sun are during sunrise and sunset. Every one is different and unique. At those times, the sun is at eye level, and the thickness (and dirtiness) of the atmosphere provide a bit of protection for viewing with the unprotected eye. As the sun passes across the horizon, light is split into bright colors of the spectrum, providing a beautiful spectacle. I've probably taken thousands of sunset and sunrise pictures over the years, but here are two of my favorites, a sunset in Newport California a few years ago (above), and sunrise over Lake Rotorua in New Zealand in 2004 (below). To this day I cannot keep straight my internal compass; I couldn't help but think the sun was rising in the west (it wasn't). Lake Rotorua is one of the world's rare geothermal regions with geysers. Hot springs in the lake account for the steam rising off the water.

A difficult phenomena to see related to sunsets is the green flash. It is a sudden flash of greenish light above the sun at the moment of sunset, and it is said to last only a second or so. As the sun dips into the horizon, the layers of the atmosphere will cause some of the sunlight to be refracted, with red and orange on the lower parts of the disk along with green (and rarely blue) across the top.

It takes some very specific circumstances to see the flash, a clear view to a distant horizon, most often along coastlines. I have relatives on the coast of Oregon, so I've had a fair number of chances to try and capture the moment. I may even have succeeded once or twice.

Rainbows are one of the most familiar optical effects associated with the sun. Most everyone has seen them, so it takes some unique circumstances to really set one apart from others. My favorite moment came with a monsoonal storm on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon last year. I was looking down at a rainbow in the depths of the canyon.

Rainbows involve the splitting of white light from the sun into its component colors of the spectrum. Caves and deep slot canyons provide another sort of splitting, that of the sun's energy into a more or less pinhole of light. I was exploring a lava tube in the Mojave National Preserve a few years back. It was dark inside, but there were a few small skylights, and the early afternoon sun came bursting through like a blast from alien phaser.

One of the more famous places to see beams of light from the sun is in Antelope Canyon, Arizona. A deep slot canyon, Antelope is one of the most popular tourist stops on the Navajo Nation. The sandstone canyon is more than 100 feet deep, and only a few feet wide at the top. One can actually jump across if it were allowed. Tours are offered all day, but one pays a premium around noon for the obvious reason that it's when the sun sends beams of light into the depths of the canyon.

The effect is truly spectacular, although one should be aware that as lonely as these pictures seem, I was shoulder to shoulder with other photographers snapping like crazy.

Another fascinating phenomena occurs when the Moon passes into the Earth's shadow, a lunar eclipse. They are not rare, happening around two times a year, and they can be seen simultaneously across the globe (as long as the moon is visible in the sky). 

Lunar eclipses are fascinating to watch, and it is surprising to realize just how much of the sun's light is reflected from the moon. At totality, the moon practically disappears except for some refracted light around the edge of the Earth. Hundreds of stars become visible that weren't there moments earlier.

In a ridiculous age when science has to convince some people that the Earth is not actually flat, a lunar eclipse can help. The Earth casts a circular shadow across the surface of the Moon.

And then there is the opposite number, those events that result from the Moon passing in front of the Sun, a Solar eclipse. Although the Sun is many times larger than the Moon, the Moon is much closer to the earth, and is thus big enough to blot out the sun entirely. Solar eclipses are rarer than Lunar eclipses, and total solar eclipses are rarer still. I've been able to photograph a number of partial Solar eclipses over the years. For me, it is a clumsy affair, trying to hold a filter over the lens while keeping the Sun in the frame, but I've surrendered to the use of a tripod a few times to make it work.

The picture above is one of my favorites because of the huge sunspots that were present during the Moon's transit across the disc of the Sun. If the eclipse occurs when the Moon is farther from the Earth (it has an elliptical orbit), an annular eclipse can occur, in which the Moon doesn't cover the entire disc of the sun. I caught the picture below in 2012.

And then there are the transits of the planets. These happen when a planet crosses the disk of the Sun. Only two planets can do this, Mercury and Venus, because they are the only planets with orbits that are closer to the Sun than Earth. I've witnessed two of them.

A transit of the planet Mercury took place in May of 2016. I almost missed it because of cloud cover, but they cleared enough for a couple of shots. There was a sunspot as well. In the picture below, the top arrow points to a sunspot. The lower arrow points to Mercury. It is a small planet, only barely bigger than the Moon, and it orbits much closer to the Sun. Such transits are only visible by binocular or telescope (with filters, of course).

Zooming in made Mercury a bit clearer (below). Transits of Mercury are not overly rare, occurring in 1999, 2003, 2006, and 2016. Another will take place in November of 2019, but then we will need to wait until 2032 to see another.

The rarest Sun-related event I've ever seen is a transit of the planet Venus. The one I witnessed happened in 2012 (below). Previous transits had been in 1874, 1882, and 2004. The next will not happen until 2117 (in December, if you are planning on watching).

The big event of all things Solar is of course a total Solar eclipse. As noted above, it's been decades since one took place in the lower 48 states, and next won't cross my neck of the woods until 2045. I'll be almost 90 years old if I make it that far. I've had the privilege of witnessing one, though, in 1991. It crossed the south end of Baja California at San Jose del Cabo. A small expedition from MJC drove the length of the Baja Peninsula to see the event, one of the great adventures of my life. I didn't get pictures at the time, as the best technology I had was a Kodak Instamatic. The pictures below are from Dr. William Luebke, MJC's retired astronomy professor.

There is nothing quite like the few moments of totality. The sky goes dark, stars and planets become visible, and the ambient temperature plummets (it was summer when we were there, and the temperature dropped from over 100 degrees to 80 or less; it was a relief). The corona of the sun becomes visible, and there may be solar prominences visible as well. We had more than four minutes of totality, more than usual.

It's going to be a zoo in Oregon in a few weeks, as literally millions of people are converging on the region to have a look at this rare event. We will be staying about an hour's drive from the path of totality, so I have no idea if we'll be able to even get to the dark zone through the gridlocked traffic. If we do, I'll be busy getting pictures to share, and if we don't...well...we'll always have Baja.

Rock and Light, the Primal Elements of Death Valley

When one has been under gloomy overcast conditions punctuated by periods of rain for days, the novelty can run short, even in a place where rain is scarce. We had been on the road for three days and in that time we saw no sunshine, and in fact had lived through a night of record rainfall and localized flooding. What made the mood worse was that the weather forecasts had us expecting sunshine on the third day and we got rain instead.

The students were just great actually, showing all kinds of patience. They were in Death Valley after all, and they weren't in a classroom. At least not the kind with four walls. Just the same, I was pining for just a bit of sunlight, and the evening was coming quickly. We had just finished an exercise at Gower Gulch at the north end of the Black Mountains and we walking back to the vehicles when a sliver of sky opened up. The sun blazed forth in all its glory.

There are two sure things in places like Death Valley, rock and light. Deserts have dust storms at times, of course, but much of the time the air is free of pollution and humidity. The sun shines with an intensity not usually experienced in urban settings (my students traditionally come home with winter sunburns despite our warnings to use sunscreen).

And the rock...Death Valley has perhaps the greatest variety of rock types to be found in any national park. They range in age from 1.7 billion to practically yesterday. They include all of the types, plutonic, volcanic, sedimentary, and metamorphic. The rocks occur in nearly all the colors of the rainbow, sometimes in a single outcrop (google Death Valley's Artist Palette if you want to see what I mean). And in most parts of the park there is no vegetation or soil to obscure their complicated structures and relationships.

It's hard to imagine a more dramatic moment for the two elements to intersect. The sun was low in the sky, the rocks were wet from the recent rain storm, so the colors were intensified and the rocks seemed to glow with an inner light.

The rocks we were looking at were part of the Mio-Pliocene sediments and ash/lava flows of the Furnace Creek, Funeral, and Artist Drive formations. They accumulated in a fault basin not totally unlike the present-day Death Valley graben. There were ephemeral lakes, alluvial fans, floodplains, and volcanoes. The plains probably supported a rich fauna of camels, horses, mastodons, birds and predatory cats, who left their tracks in similar-aged rocks elsewhere in the park.

It was a dramatic moment, but as with so many such moments, it was fleeting. The clouds closed in again, and we thought the show was over, except that a few moments later while we drove the highway north of Furnace Creek, the skies opened up one more time to reveal a brilliant rainbow (see the opening picture...as if you somehow missed it!). The moment felt perfect.

Addendum: Since we are talking the incredible fossil record of Death Valley, there is news this week of some horrible human beings who have stolen some of the precious fossil trackways I mentioned. I can only hope that the pictures of the probable thieves will lead to arrests and convictions. More information can be found here: http://vertpaleo.org/Society-News/SVP-Paleo-News/Paleontology-News/Fossils-Stolen-from-Death-Valley-National-Park.aspx

Moment of Pure Beauty on a Horrific Day

It's hard not to feel depressed or hopeless when terrible things happen, when people do horrible things to those around them, and when innocent people die needlessly. The latest of far too many attacks hit close to home, near where I grew up, and where I still have connections. 

I have no profound words or insights, there have been plenty of such discussions on the social media that I follow. I do hope that some action will finally be taken to prevent future massacres. It's so easy to feel hopeless.

Sometimes, the Earth presents us with such beauty that we can forget the evil for a few moments. It was raining today, a blessing in itself after four years of lingering drought. The sky seemed to be completely overcast, but out west, the light from the setting sun found a path through the clouds, and for a few short moments we had a spectacular rainbow, a double bow that extended across the sky. We don't really get a lot of them around here (given the general rarity of storms, period), so this was  kind of an exceptional moment.

I don't know where our sense of beauty comes from, but there is something so pleasing about the spectrum of color that appears when sunlight is refracted through water droplets. It's high in the sky, and seemingly distant and unattainable, kind of like the ideals of being human. There is a sort of perfection we can hope to reach as individuals and as a society. I don't mean this in the sense of some religious belief that is "better" than the belief of someone else. There's too much conflict there. I mean it in the sense that we might one day find a way to treat each other with kindness, respect and equality, a recognition that we have a limited time in our own existence to make the world a slightly better place.

It's maybe kind of odd to think of it this way, but in geology we describe a form of "perfection". We call it a "graded stream". Rivers flow to the sea. The longer a river exists, the more it molds a landscape so as to achieve the most efficient flow, using the least amount of energy. If there is an obstruction, a landslide, say, or a dam, such things are ultimately removed by the erosive force of the fast-moving water. If there are pools, the stream slows, and dumps sediment in such a way as to fill in the gaps. As long as the water moves, the river approaches a form of physical perfection, with a channel that transports water to the sea in the smoothest manner possible (subject to the laws of physics). Perfection is never reached, because landslides and earthquakes will always happen, but the river works through these interruptions. It never stops changing the channel through which it flows.

Humans can never be perfect. But we can change the world we live in. We can choose to be the disasters, the landslides and other catastrophes, or we can be part of the constant never-ending flow that smooths out the imperfections. We can take away the hate. It takes patience, courage, and empathy for others.

A Very Long Dry Spell (40 Days +) Ends. Please, More Days Like This!

What does it take to make a Walmart parking lot pretty? Atmospheric phenomena is a big help. I spend as little time as possible at Walmarts of any kind, but there was a fast food outlet nearby, and we wanted to eat something before shopping at WinCo, a store that apparently treats their employees with a bit more respect (they own it). Politics aside, for four minutes we were treated to a spectacular rainbow.

The rainbow was a particularly welcome one. It came on the heels of a real gully-washer today, which capped three days of rain, the first precipitation following an unprecedented dry spell of more than forty days. We had not a drop of rain during the entire month of January.

The three-day long stormy period provided a good example of something that scientists and statisticians like to describe as the difference between accuracy and precision. Weather forecasting has become somewhat more precise and accurate over the years, but it is sometimes more of one and less of the other. The forecast called for 0.64 inches of rain on Friday, 0.02 inches of rain on Saturday, and 0.43 inches of rain on Sunday. These values, to the nearest one-hundredth inch, are quite precise.

What actually arrived in my rain gauge was 0.14 inches on Friday, 0.43 inches on Saturday, and 0.98 so far today on Sunday. That means that the prediction was very precise, but not so very accurate. But since the precipitation amounts ended up on the high side, I couldn't be happier. Of course, no insult towards meteorologists is implied; they would actually give their predictions as a range of possible values rather than the precise numbers apparently demanded by Intellicast.

What does this mean in terms of California's crippling drought? Not as much as we could hope. The 1.55 inches of precipitation brings my local amount for the rain year to over 10 inches. 12 inches would mean an average year, a wonderful result on paper. But the problem is that getting normal precipitation here in the Great Valley doesn't mean all that much. That water helps by soaking into the soil and replenishing the groundwater to some extent, but the most important source of water in California is the Sierra Nevada snowpack. And the snowpack is in bad shape, at only about 25% of normal.

The problem is that these wet storms have been coming out of the tropics. The storms drop a fair amount of rain, but they are warm storms (temperatures this week have been in the 70s!). We need a couple of heavy-duty arctic storms, and those have so far failed to materialize. A persistent high pressure dome settled over California for all of January, diverting the arctic storms north over Canada and then down into New York and Boston. They've taken all our snow! I heard on the radio today a government official in charge of snowplows in an eastern city, and he said they were running out of places to put the plowed snow. A suggestion? Put the snow in trucks and trains and send out to the Sierra Nevada. We could use it.

In the meantime we very much enjoyed one of the most vivid rainbows I've ever seen in our fair city.