Boreal B[l]og

This is the twentieth anniversary of my first section hike on the Appalachian Trail (AT).  I never finished the trail; indeed, I hiked only the southern quarter of it in two section hikes, 528 miles total, with another couple of miles in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I went to college, for the AT went right through town.  I have another couple of miles on Mount Moosilauke in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the tenth highest of the 4000 foot summits in the Whites.  I climbed it my freshman year in 1966.

The AT was something that I put on The List and eventually took off.  I have no plans to hike the remaining 1600-odd miles, although I have no regrets having done my two section hikes, one in 1998, the other the following year.  The first one was painful, learning the hard way how to do a long distance backpack; the second was done properly, and I have fond memories of the three weeks I was in the woods, making over three hundred miles good with no blisters and little pain.

I had many “AT moments,” the shelters, the white blazes, the bears, the camping out in the middle of nowhere, “starlight. moonlight and firefly light,” but perhaps one of the classic moments was when I became a recipient of the kindness of a trail angel.  I never thought I would some day become one, and indeed, I didn’t even think of the fact until recently, nineteen years later and on the other side of the continent.

Somewhere in northern Georgia, when I descended one of the many mountains of the AT, I saw a man standing near the road that I would be crossing before ascending the mountain on the opposite side.  The AT was down, down, down to a road and up, up, and still more up on the other side.  My pack that summer day was lighter, after I had dumped 10 pounds of gear I didn’t need at a store that specialized in shipping unwanted gear home.  I also bought a Pepsi, which gave me the energy to get to my camp that night.

Anyway, back to further north in Georgia: next to that somebody was a cooler, and as I approached, the somebody asked if I wanted a can of Dr. Pepper.

A free Dr. Pepper out here.  You’ve got to be kidding.

One has to understand that after a few days on the Trail, a hiker is in a state of borderline biological red alert when it comes to food.  I was additionally dry, hot, a bit hypoglycemic, and totally beat that afternoon, so I initially didn’t process his words.  I looked up, and no, it was not a mirage, it was a man holding a can of Dr. Pepper.

A free, cold Dr. Pepper out here.  You’ve got to be kidding.

I took the can, swallowed the liquid in about two gulps, and thanked him, in that order.  It was wonderful—sweet, cold, and wet, with a bit of caffeine to boot.  I think I can still taste it twenty years later.  Thanking the man profusely, I crossed the road, thinking that maybe the other side wouldn’t be so difficult after all.

That’s a trail angel, and the AT is famous for them.

Across the miles, 19 years, and a continent, on the West Coast trail, AKA PCNST, or the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, three of us were dayhiking south right by Lower Rosary Lake, headed back towards Willamette Pass.  We had taken a loop off the PCT up to Tait’s Loop, which two of us would adopt during the coming winter, making sure the trail markers, blue diamonds, were in place.  We had intersected the PCT and were returning on it. Ahead, we saw an elderly couple with good sized backpacks cross the outlet stream of the lake, and as we approached, they started up a conversation.  They were early 60s, retired, and didn’t bother to shed their packs while talking to us.  Long distance hikers are part of their pack, and one has to have been such a hiker to truly appreciate that fact.  After a week of high mileage days, I was my pack.  My pack was another appendage, a home, a lifeline.  They looked strong, with not one bit of unessential gear with them.  Thru-hikers.

Anyway, last summer a good share of the Three Sisters and Mt. Jefferson Wildernesses were burning, and there had been some trail closures, including many miles of the PCT.  The couple, from Alaska and sporting “Alaska Flour” shirts, knew that, so they were going to take some rest days in Bend around the 21st to see what was going to happen.

August 21, 2017 was a big day.  That was the solar eclipse, and these folks, if they continued, would walk right into the path of totality.  I asked them if they knew about the eclipse.  They knew a little and figured Bend would be suitable. It wasn’t.  Before they got to Bend, they would walk into the path of totality, but if they weren’t careful, they could walk right out of the path, too.

Normally, I don’t usually tell people what to do.  I offer an opinion, make some suggestions and expect them do what they want.  Most people do that and aren’t interested in my advice.  I accept that and usually stay quiet.

But, neither quiet nor Bend was suitable, and this was a total friggin’ solar eclipse, for crying out loud.  One of my hiking companions, who would adopt the trail with me, a good friend, would end up staying in Eugene, outside the path, for the eclipse, although he had heard me give a talk to 80 charged up people about it back in June at the Obsidian Lodge and came away less than impressed.  I wasn’t going to change his mind, and he would one day tell me he regretted his choice, but these people deserved to know more.  I mentioned that they would be close to totality, and if they could get north of Bend, they would be able to see it.  I further added that I had seen sixteen of the things (I don’t think I used “friggin’) and they were incredible sights.  I gave it my strongest recommendation: “It’s worth seeing.”  They had a few more miles to go that night and we needed to get back to our vehicle, so we parted ways, we went south, they north.

Interview by KEZI-TV anchor Renee McCullough in the Eugene Science Center, April 2017.

Lower Rosary Lake in winter

I had quite forgotten about the couple until sometime in September, when I got one of those strange emails, where the sender is a weird name that makes no sense, except the message line is somehow very relevant.  The couple had seen the total eclipse by Santiam Lake, somehow able to get far enough into the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness near Three-fingered Jack.  I was thanked in capital letters for having suggested they go to the eclipse track.  They hiked in to one of the more beautiful spots I could think of—I had been to Santiam Lake on a hike the past June—and had clear skies, no smoke, and a beautiful view.  Someone even took a raft out on the lake—which is a tough 6 miles in from US20 and about eight in from Duffy Lake—and saw the eclipse from the middle.  Wow. That was better than my experience in eastern Oregon.  The couple was back in Alaska, but they were planning to come down again next year and finish off the PCT.

I was thrilled.  I didn’t have a cooler, and I didn’t have Dr. Pepper, but this Doctor had a cool idea for them, and it worked out just fine.

Trail Angel.  Nice term.  I can now apply it to myself for a very uncommon reason.

Santiam Lake and Three-fingered Jack, June 2017.

“Without music, my life would be a lot less enjoyable.  Without science, my life would have ended a long time ago.”   My letter published in Newsweek, many years ago.

It’s a honor to know that I think the same way Neil deGrasse Tyson does about both the night sky and about society’s tacit approval of math illiteracy.

I have spoken to several groups about the upcoming solar eclipse.  Oddly, the largest number to whom I have spoken was not an group of adults but children at “a little school” (the teacher’s comment, not mine) in eastern Oregon.  In an hour, I spoke to all grades, about 100 students, and then in another hour spent time with about fifteen in a class, showing them how to make a solar filter on their own.  The other talks have had fewer than twenty, sometimes under ten.  Last week, I spoke at the LIONS meeting, and despite the microphone’s being near the speaker at one point, making a god-awful noise, one man was asleep right in front of me within 5 minutes after I began.

My solar eclipse talks have been short:  It’s worth seeing totality; protect your eyes and drive safely to and from the event; if you are a first timer, don’t waste precious seconds trying to take a picture.  Then I answer questions, and if the Sun is shining, have people look at it through solar filters.

Students at Prairie City school in Oregon view the Sun.  The total eclipse will last 2m6s there.

Howard Elementary 5th graders in Eugene.

Eastern Oregon, 1 hour after leaving Prairie City. My payment for the talk.

I’ve stayed away from the math explaining why a total solar eclipse occurs.  Much of it isn’t complicated, but people don’t like numbers.  On the 2006 eclipse tour to Libya, there were several eclipse talks, and I asked the editor of one of the astronomy magazines why he didn’t discuss the Saros cycle in detail.  His answer was short, “People don’t like to look at numbers.”

While perhaps readers don’t like to look at numbers, perhaps they might learn something interesting by viewing 6 of them.

223 Synodic periods (common lunar cycle we know)=6585.32 days: The Moon has to be new for a solar eclipse to occur.  That lines up the three bodies in one plane.

239 Anomalistic (from perigee, closest approach, to perigee)=6585.54 days; the Moon must be within a few days of its closest point in order to appear to have the same apparent size (we call it angular size) as the Sun. Too far away, and the Moon will appear smaller, “inside” the Sun, a ring or annular eclipse.

242 Draconic (crossing the plane of the Earth’s orbit)=6585.36 days; the Moon must cross the plane of the Earth’s orbit when new in addition to being the right distance from Earth for a total solar eclipse to occur.  Crossing the plane lines up the three bodies in a plane perpendicular to the synodic.

Divide 6585 days by 365.25 days in a year and one gets 18 years 10.3 days, meaning that eclipses repeat.  The 18 year Saros cycle means that eclipses recur, shifted a third of the way around the world, which is what the decimal 0.3 shows, but the same general path occurs on the Earth.  Ancient people without computers knew this, and they didn’t know the math we know today, an impressive feat.

While these cycles aren’t exact, they are so close that an eclipse “family” will continue for some 70 eclipses, give or take about three.  That makes a family last 1200-1400 years before the small changes in many cycles finally fail to allow an eclipse to occur.  I think the resonance of these cycles might be part of the Musica Universalis, the Music of the Spheres, an idea dating at least to Pythagoreas, yes, that guy, that music was part of the movement of the celestial bodies.  If those three cycles aren’t beautiful, one has amaurosis mathematica, math blindness.

It’s not OK to use “I’m not good at math” to explain away inability to calculate basic things in life.  When I taught statistics to adults, I once made the comment that I didn’t care for a lot of jazz, and the class hammered me.  Wow, one would think I was born with a major defect.  I think the idea of people jamming is neat, playing off each other, finding the right beat, the right chord, the right sense; that is special.  I can’t do that, but I appreciate those who can.  What bothers me about math is that people use “not being good” as proud excuses to explain away issues, rather than concerns that they might be losing money, being conned, or missing out on something special in the world.  Without jazz, my life would be less full; without math, I would not have practiced medicine or even gone to college.

If I could learn to play the piano, and I did learn, I think that it is appropriate to say that others should learn to do basic math and like it. An astronomer the other night at the Club spoke how he taught basic astronomy to students without using math.  Everybody thought that was great, including me, until I thought about it a little.  Why leave out math?  By doing that, one fails to show why math is important.  One fails to listen to the Music of the Spheres.  What’s so wrong about showing the difference between an ellipse and a circle, between a parabola and a hyperbola?  You’ve got a satellite dish, and that is a parabola. These four conics all have a square or a quadratic term present, and quadratics are essential to understand energy of motion, gravity, projectiles, tides, how the solar system works, why we should wear seat belts and not drive too quickly around curves.

Maybe if we understood math a little better, we’d realize the number e, yes, there is a number e, used in a variety of places, including continuously compounding interest.

$1 at 8% for nine years, compounded each year $1(1+.08)^9=$1.99; we make interest on interest.

Compound twice a year, it is (1+(.08/2))^18 or1.04^18= $2.025.

We can compound daily (1+(.04/365))^365*18=$2.0543.

We can continuously compound, infinitely, and 1+(.08/n)^nt=e^(.08t)=e^(0.64)=$2.0544; notice where the 0.08 goes.

This infinitely number of compounding times sadly doesn’t give us infinite riches but approaches a limit given by the number e, the exponential.  Interestingly, it is far easier to calculate continuous compounding than it is daily compounding.

Note the close resonance of the product (multiplication) of the interest rate in per cent times the number of years it takes to double money.  That product is 72. In other words, 8 per cent interest  means that debt, money, population will double in 9 years, 72/8.  At 24% credit card interest, debt doubles in 72/24=3 years.  One student once asked me why we learned the formula for compound interest.  When I explained to him how with punching 5 keys on a calculator, he could find that the tripling time of money at 8% interest was just under 14 years, he was stunned.  Divide 110 by the interest rate.

Yes, beautiful, essential, interesting numbers.  Enjoy the eclipse.  Enjoy the knowledge that three cycles are coming together in August the way they did on 20 July 1963, 54 years and 32 days from when I saw this same eclipse family, canoeing in Canada’s Algonquin Park, where I saw the reflection of the solar crescent in Dickson Lake.

Thrice 18 years 10.3 days.

It’s easy to get disoriented finding one’s way around the night sky from the Southern Hemisphere.  I’ve been south of the equator 11 times, each time having to relearn the southern night sky.  From our ship in the Java Sea, 4 degrees south of the Equator, almost all the northern hemisphere constellations were visible, but they appeared upside down, although my Down Under friends would disagree.

My wife and I had done a lot of laps walking around the deck during this cruise, never using the elevators.  We were piling up steps, number of feet climbed, in a losing effort to burn off the calories it was so easy to consume on board.  At least we eschewed alcohol, saving both money and calories.

On one evening walk on the third deck, we stopped to look at some of the stars, despite the bright lights aft.  My wife spotted Orion, high overhead, and from there I was able to work my way around familiar stars in both the northern and southern celestial hemispheres.  From the Equator, theoretically the entire sky is visible, although near the horizon faint stars disappear, because we look through many thicknesses of the Earth’s atmosphere to the horizon.  Go outside on a dark night sometime and notice how much brighter a star appears overhead compared to when it was on the horizon.

We did see a bright star to the south, but I couldn’t identify it, needing a darker sky.  The next night, we went looking for a better spot.  The first place we tried was the bow, but some ship workers told us that was off limits.  We weren’t convinced, however, because we had been there in daylight without problems, so we waited until they were gone and snuck back, but found the area dark and full of obstructions.  Chastened, we beat it back to safety and planned another assault to view the dark sky.  My wife suggested seven decks higher, where we finally found an open deck with a small platform that allowed us a view over a plexiglass rail.  The sky was beautiful, the ambient light minimal but enough to keep us from tripping over a bollard or a deck chair.

Now I could see some neat stuff.  Leaving Orion behind, I pointed out the False Cross and then the true Southern Cross, low in the east.  I was speaking softly, when a man approached, asking if he could join us.  We helped him up, since the platform held four or five.  He was either an astrophysicist from Vancouver or was interested in astrophysics, I wasn’t really sure, but he definitely wanted to learn the night sky.

Now I was in my element.  Night sky, interested person, chance to teach, to talk about what the stuff meant, along with what I didn’t know, which is a lot.

I started with Orion:  On the Equator, Orion is a bit hard on the neck, but wow, even the sword was bright, and the Milky Way’s running through Orion and Monoceros was fabulous, although I omitted mentioning the name of the latter.  Keep things simple.  I took us around the stars of the Winter/Summer Hexagon/Heptagon, depending whether one counts Castor and Pollux as one or two.  Following Orion’s belt to the south, I began with Sirius, brightest star in the night sky and closest night star visible to the unaided eye; then Rigel; Aldebaran; and Procyon; P for the next star, Pollux; then Castor; C for the next star, Capella; then back to Sirius.  Red Betelgeuse was in the middle and at the opposite end of Orion from Rigel.  The astrophysics guy was able to appreciate the colors of Betelgeuse, orange Aldebaran and slightly orange Pollux.  He was having fun, I was having a blast. My wife found the Pleiades, one of her favorites, and she was contibuting, too.  This was great.  I mentioned the Hyades Cluster around Aldebaran, about a third the distance of the Pleiades.

From Sirius, we looked down to Canopus, the second brightest star, just visible from southern Arizona in the winter, but really bright here on the Equator.  The astrophysics guy loved it.  He had once been to a star party in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, and was starting to remember a few things. I then took him further south in the sky, to alpha-Centauri and the Southern Cross.  This was new to him, and he was thrilled, saying he wished his wife were up with us.

By now, I was fully dark adapted, and I remembered in March, the Magellanic Clouds are visible, and pointed them out a little south of where we had been looking.  This was amazing, reminding me of the writer Peter Leschak’s words:  “You don’t see this stuff every day.  But you do see it every night, under a clear, dark sky.”  Or something like that.

Not detecting boredom, and not being told by my wife I had said enough, I kept going. I pointed out the three stars of Orion’s belt, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, from left to right in the northern hemisphere, and I was totally confused what to call them overhead, laughing.  OK, Mintaka was about overhead, lying on the celestial equator, the projection of our equator on the night sky.  Orion is great.  Want to learn the night sky?  Find Orion, and you can learn to name about 18 stars in a hurry:  Betelgeuse and Bellatrix are at the top, in the Northern Hemisphere, Saiph and Rigel on the bottom.  But top and bottom are different on the equator—different degrees of neck straining.  Betelgeuse is definitely red and the belt goes directly overhead.  At least where we were.  Your results may vary.

So, seven stars in Orion; near Sirius was Murzim to the west; near Procyon, Gomeisa shone to the left or west; near Castor and Pollux was Alhena near Betelgeuse.  I think that’s 16.  Canopus and Alpha-Centauri make 18.  The astrophysicist mentioned that everything we were looking at was part of the Milky Way.  He was doing great.  I pointed to the region where the open star clusters M41,near Sirius, M35 near Alhena were.  We were rolling now.  I talked about the “kids,” three dim stars near Capella, one of which fades in an eclipse every 27 years, although I was damned if I could remember which Greek letter it was (it’s epsilon). The last eclipse was 2010.  I doubt I will see it eclipsed again, but I’ve seen two, and they were fascinating.  I mentioned I was formerly a variable star observer, measuring the light of pulsating intrinsic variables and eclipsing binaries.  Astronomy is such a huge field.

The astrophysicist mentioned that Andromeda was the furthest we could see with the unaided eye and continued that Hubble was one who realized that Andromeda might be beyond our galaxy.  Great.  He was teaching.  That got me talking about the Cepheid variables, whose brightness is a function of their cycle, something that allowed us to determine Andromeda’s distance.  Thank you, Henrietta Leavitt, one of the forgotten—not by me—women of astronomy, who discovered that.*  The astrophysics guy said he was going to try to bring his wife top side.

At that point, my wife was going to try to bring me back to Earth, or at least the lowest deck, where our room was.  Fair enough.

I’ll remember a lot from the cruise, but that night with the astrophysics guy was better than a lot of tours we took.

I bet he’d say the same thing.

*Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921) proposed the periodicity-luminosity ratio for Cepheid variables in the Magellanic Clouds, discovering that the brighter ones had a longer periodicity.  Assuming correctly that they were all similar distances from the Earth, it was then possible to determine the distances of remote objects.  Hubble used it to determine the distance Andromeda Galaxy was far further from the Earth than we could have imagined, that the universe was expanding,  huge leaps in astronomical knowledge.

My wife and I are dedicated eclipse chasers.  Yes, we are crazy folks (we prefer the adjective “interesting”) who go to the ends of the Earth and take a chance on the weather in order to see the Moon completely cover the Sun, one of my top four sights in nature.  By the ends of the Earth, I mean both poles, Pitcairn Island, all 7 continents, Siberia in March, and five times in Africa.

I have been fortunate enough to have been in many beautiful wilderness areas, and the other top three were a face-to-face encounter with a wolf on Isle Royale, nobody within ten trail miles of me; the annual migration of the Sandhill Cranes; and the closeness I’ve been to grizzlies in Alaska.

Bears at Brooks Falls, Katmai

On our last chase, hoping to see my sixteenth total eclipse, we flew to Singapore, boarded the MS Volendam and sailed across the equator (my finally earning at long last “shellback” status) to Indonesia, first south, later east and finally northbound for the eclipse 8 days later.

I wasn’t particularly eager to take the trip. Long flights are difficult, I don’t sleep well, and I’m not a great people person, so cruises and Asia aren’t places I like to be.  Still, I will do what it takes to see an eclipse.  We took a tour in Jakarta, so I trod on the soil of my fiftieth country.  I’ve seen a lot of the Third World, only a few times actually immersing myself in it helping people, time measured in days, not months or years, and it is difficult to see how most of the people in the world live.

We often find special moments in unexpected places.  On Jakarta’s tour, I saw the usual monuments and museums that I guess I should see, although frankly I am not a monument or a museum person.  Maybe I should be, but I don’t judge harshly those who don’t share my love for the wilderness.  In Probblingo, we went into town for the sole reason to find a mall to buy a couple of cotton Indonesian shirts like the ones we had seen in Jakarta.  We found the mall, got the shirts, explored the place, and enjoyed ourselves.  The tour was on our own, lasted two hours, and we have fond memories of the place.

National Monument in Jakarta

Red Church in Probblingo

Several days later, heading north towards the eclipse track, we stopped in Makassar, a city on the southwest corner of the island of Sulawesi, across the strait from Borneo.  This was a place I never expected to see, a comment I make on every eclipse trip.  We saw Fort Rotterdam, avoided getting run over in traffic, and later returned aboard the ship, a little nervous about next day’s eclipse.

Fort Rotterdam in Makassar

Eclipse chasing requires one to be at exactly the right place at the exactly right time, have decent skies, clear where the Sun happens to be.  This is a tall order in the tropics, especially during rainy season.  Sometimes, we have had to explain to a tour guide that “exact time” means to the second, not whenever one happens to arrive.  Exact time for eclipses does not mean mañana.  There is no mañana.  It is be there or miss it.  You can’t see it “some other time.”

With that attitude, I can perhaps be forgiven for not being overly polite to those who dawdle going to the eclipse path, thinking that my visiting one more museum or monument is important.  No, seeing the eclipse will make my trip.  If that means I miss a monument, an elephant ride, a temple, or a church, so be it.  My priority is seeing the eclipse.  I’ve heard stories of ships being 2 hours late to the eclipse track, of vehicles breaking down.

Fortunately, we had a good captain, who along with his bridge crew understood our needs.  He steamed a little further west in the Makassar Strait than originally planned, because cloudiness was less there.  It’s not only a matter of rain that may affect eclipses, but those puffy, pretty cumulus clouds become eclipse killers on eclipse day, and we needed to dodge them.

A good eclipse is directly proportional to the amount of sunscreen one uses.

My wife and I were up at 5 to get a place on the 9th deck on the starboard side at 5:10, where twenty people had already arrived.  Stars were visible, Jupiter dotting in and out of view between clouds to the west.  Well, I thought, there is hope, but I couldn’t yet see the sky well.  We didn’t have much equipment, but we still brought up two chairs from the deck below.  The Sun rose just after 6, and the clouds were not great, not bad.  We knew the Sun would be higher during eclipse, and we waited. Others arrived, bringing more deck chairs from below.

People on deck before totality

At first contact, where the Moon takes a small bite out of the Sun, it was partly cloudy.  Eclipses last about two and a half hours, totality in the middle, a little less than 3 minutes for this eclipse, 7 minutes and 32 seconds maximum possible.  After first contact, the Sun often disappeared behind a cloud for a few minutes, which is no problem, unless those minutes are during totality.  As the eclipse progressed, weather prospects improved.  The clouds became fewer and thinner.  The Sun’s projection through the weave of our deck chairs showed a multitude of crescents on the deck below, scores of pinhole cameras.  This is one of our favorite times during every eclipse.

Crescents made by eclipsed Sun’s shining through tiny holes in a deck chair

As the crescent shrank to nearly nothing, I looked behind me to the west.  I was first to call out the arrival of the Moon’s shadow, a huge, dark mass, approaching at 30 miles a minute, the Moon’s orbital speed.  I turned around in time to see the Diamond Ring, the last bit of sunlight, and then beautiful totality, lasting 2 minutes and 45 seconds, over the calm Makassar Strait.  After the second Diamond Ring, the end of totality, I quickly looked down and east, calling out the rapidly disappearing Moon’s shadow, leaving us at a half mile a second.  For some time now, I have regularly watched the disappearance of the Moon’s shadow.  It’s visible for about 5, maybe 10 seconds.  I don’t know anybody who has ever mentioned it in eclipse talks.

Totality

Maybe they never looked.  After all, when totality is over, most people leave to celebrate, unfortunately in our instance leaving their chairs on the deck, instead of putting them back where they got them.  That’s kind of rude, even on a cruise ship.

Then a man about my age nudged me.  “Thank you,” he said, with his wife’s standing by him, “for pointing out the shadow’s disappearance.  I saw it, and I had never seen that before.  It was really interesting.”  His wife nodded.

Moon’s shadow’s disappearing.  It is subtle, but the darkness on the horizon is the shadow

All total solar eclipses are special.  Sometimes, what I remember best is not the black disk in the sky covering the Sun, but something else, quite unexpected, like a disappearing shadow.  The man’s comments made my day.  I taught him something, and he was glad.

Later, my wife and I picked up about four dozen chairs left behind and helped the crew return them.  Yes, the crew is there to serve the passengers, but put the chairs back.

It appeases the eclipse gods.