Solar Eclipse - August 2017

The 2017 Eclipse occurred one week ago – and I’m posting about our experience today!

We were concerned that York, Nebraska – where we had originally planned to be to observe the eclipse - would be cloudy so we’d looked at maps and weather forecasts the evening before and decided to drive 1.5 hours west and north to Loup City, Nebraska. It was a short drive west along the Interstate and then through farms. We made a ‘rest’ stop in Cairo, Nebraska since there were several locations in Loup City and we weren’t sure how long it would take to find things/what facilities would be available.

The first location we found was perfect: Jenners Park in Loup Nebraska. There was a playground and bit trees. I walked around to look at the place before the eclipse started.

Then I came back and put my camera on a tripod with a solar filter ready for the eclipse to start.

My husband had a fancier set up with two cameras on a telescope mount (so it would track) and another tripod with a camera to take video during totality.

My daughter enjoyed the event without a camera….although she did give in a take some pictures during totality with her cell phone. Other families enjoyed Jenners Park as well and there were pleasant conversations as the eclipse progressed. There were several people with connections to University of Arizona where my daughter just finished graduate school!

One of the cottonwoods near the street had the effect of a pinhole projection system for the eclipse. The first time I noticed it was earlier in the eclipse…and the second was much closer to totality…just a sliver of the sun shining. I hurried back to my camera to observe totality.

The slide show below shows my pictures as the eclipse started and through totality.  Note the sunspots in the early pictures and the shadow blocking them as the moon moved between Earth and the sun.

Previous posts about our Solar Eclipse trek: Road Trip to Nebraska for the Eclipse, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 26, 2017

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #101 and #102 – 50 bird pictures this week! My favorite in the first group is the barn owl (and the other owls in this group). My favorite in the second group are the two pictures of spotted owlets! --- I am drawn to owls this week for some reason.

Voyager: Inside the world’s greatest space mission – The two Voyager space craft were launched in 1977…and are both sending back messages to earth.

Trees with ‘crown shyness’ mysteriously avoid touching each other – I haven’t observed this phenomenon in our Maryland forests…but now when I am in a forest, I’ll always look for it!

Time Spent – Who Americans spend their time with (from Richard Watson’s blog). It changes with age. The last chart shows that as we get older we spend more and more time alone.

Air pollutions ranking in 32 cities –  LA ranks 24; Washington DC, San Francisco and New York are 26-28; Boston is 31. Delhi, Beijing, and Cairo are the top three.

Trees and shrubs offer new food crops to diversity the farm – Ongoing research from the University of Illinois trying to mimic the habitat features, carbon storage, and nutrient-holding capacities of a natural system with a farming method that incorporates berry and nut bearing shrubs/trees with alley cropping (hay or row crops)….to be economically and environmentally sound.

AWEA releases map of every wind farm and factory in America – There is a link to the interactive map. The red diamonds are manufactures and the blue dots are the wind farms themselves. It’s easy to see that manufactures happens a lot in areas other than where the wind farms are located….that the center of the country has a lot of installed wind turbines! We saw some of them in Iowa on our way to and from the solar eclipse last Monday.

Diversity Lacking in US Academia: Study – Under-representation of African Americans, Hispanics, and women in STEM faculties at public universities. There is a similar lack of diversity in PhD programs. On a positive note: the assistant professor is more diverse (more Asians, Hispanics and women) that the associate or full professor rank.  Unfortunately, this positive finding is not true for African Americans. Overall – still a challenge….and it impacts the broader labor market as well.

More than 300,000 Atlantic Salmon Spill into Pacific – Oh no! Hopefully this is not catastrophic in the long run. But – Why are they growing Atlantic salmon in pens in Puget Sound anyway?

Thanks to Co-op, Small Iowa Town Goes Big on Solar – Kalona, Iowa – not far from our route to the eclipse! It comes down to local self-reliance and economic development that made sense for this small town. Somehow a pointer to this article (from last February) was in a blog post I looked at when I returned home and I noticed where the town was…small world.

Road Trip to Nebraska for the Eclipse

We were in Nebraska for the eclipse last Monday having driven from Maryland --> Pennsylvania --> Ohio --> Indiana --> Illinois --> Iowa --> Nebraska on the two days prior to the eclipse. I am writing about the road trip to Nebraska today and will be posting about the rest of our eclipse adventure over the next week.  We started out very early last Saturday. Our only stop in Maryland was the South Mountain rest area which is becoming a familiar stopping point for us on the way to Pittsburg or State College.

On Saturday, we were heading to Pittsburgh to pick up our daughter along way. We stopped at the rest stop/welcome center to Pennsylvania then two service areas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’s a scenic drive and I enjoyed a peanut butter cookie purchased at the North Midway stop. We arrived at the Pittsburgh (Squirrel Hill) apartment by mid-morning.

We were back on the road and into Ohio shortly. We stopped at rest areas along the toll road (fortunately our Maryland E-ZPass tags worked for the entire trip). The first two areas had a round area where there were several options for lunch; my daughter and I chose Panera Bread at the first stop and my husband got his McDonalds lunch at the second. The third stop had a barrel vault roof.

We continued into Indiana making a rest stop along the highway and then at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore for a hike (more on that in a subsequent post) and then to our hotel in Lansing, Illinois. The next morning, we were off again after a hearty breakfast at the hotel. There were two rest stops as we crossed the state. There was a Monarch not quite warm enough to be fluttering around. It seemed to have lost a lot of scales since it looked more brown than orange.

Iowa has some themed rest stops depicting the history and energy production of the state. The tall white obelisk in the second picture is a blade of a wind turbine! The art work inside (glass etching and floor tile) was appealing.

And then we were in Nebraska – making one rest stop before arriving at our hotel in York, Nebraska. The day we arrive was clear but the forecast for eclipse day was lots of clouds. We were looking at maps and the track of the eclipse….trying to figure out whether we should head west or east on eclipse day.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 19, 2017

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Three things to know about the Louvre’s history – A fort…royal residence…and then a museum!

Americans are using less electricity today than a decade ago – Annual residential electricity sales have declined by 3% and residential electricity sales per capita is down by 7% since 2010. Advances in efficiency and shifts to smaller devices are making a difference. Some argue that electric cars will cause an increase in demand for electricity….but the same people that drive electric cars are likely to have solar panels!

Aspirin’s Four-Thousand-Year History – Willow bark was used for 1000s of years for ‘curing’ fevers. In 1897, Felix Hoffman at Bayer created chemically pure salicylic acid and then created acetylsalicylic acid which did not irritate digestion the way salicylic acid does….and Aspirin came to the marketplace.

The Quest to Restore American Elms: Nearing the Finish Line – My grandparents had elm trees around their house in Oklahoma when I was growing up in the ‘60s. My grandfather built a picnic table around one of them and we had our evening meals there during our summer visits. In my late teens, the tree began to die and eventually had to be cut down. The place lost a key element when that happened. I’m sure that was true around many homes. I hope the elms can be restored….and maybe the chestnuts too.

Climate change is disrupting the birds and the bees and Europe to experience vast and rapid ‘invasion’ by infectious diseases as climate warming continues – The effects of climate change are not just rising temperatures or changing weather patterns. Everything on earth is interrelated. Sometimes that building in resiliency to change and sometimes it enables small changes to have a domino effect that is catastrophic.

In the Earth’s hottest place, life has been found in pure acid – Microbes that survive in extreme acid, hot temperatures, and high salinity. The pH in one pool was 0…and life was found there.

Here’s a crazy idea: let’s agree on the facts – Finding common ground through data? That is what Steve Ballmer is working on. The USAFacts site is the result and it is very easy to spend time looking at the summary reports….and the linkage to raw data sources.

It’s not your imagination. Summers are getting hotter. – A graphic of the changing bell curve of the temperatures with the base period being 1950-1980…crawling toward the hot and hotter direction for the time periods since them.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #100 – There is an indigo bunting in this set. I always celebrate when I see one in the field!

The greatest threats to humanity as we know it – Infographic from BBC Future.

Preparing for the Solar Eclipse

Are you ready for the solar eclipse on Monday, 8/21? We’ve been planning where we will be and backup locations in case of clouds. My husband has solar filters for our cameras and glasses for our eyes. He also has an app to prompt us to look for certain features as the eclipse happens. He set up his two-camera rig on his telescope mount and I tried my camera on a regular tripod. The filter for my camera fits over the lens when the camera is turned on.

I was somewhat concerned that I might have to do some manual focusing but the camera autofocus algorithm seems to do well enough if the sun is in the center of the image. I took this picture earlier this week (with the filter). Do you see the sunspot (very faint…but there) in the right of the image?

More on the eclipse after it happens…

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 12, 2017

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Map of Play – A non-profit that not only builds playgrounds all over the US but also maps the ones they build and others (here). What a great way for families with children to explore the parks where they live….and when they travel!

Could a Bus with Sleep Pods Replace Airplanes? – Right now it only operates between LA and San Francisco…but it has the potential to be a less stressful way to travel than through an airport. What would it be like to take buses overnight and touring cities during the day…gradually moving cross country?

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #99 – Two pictures of peafowl! A male sitting with the tail feathers bunched behind and the head of a peahen!

The Chemistry of Giant Hogweed and how it causes skin burns – Awful plant! We were warned about this plant in Master Naturalist training since there have been some found in Maryland.

5 health benefits of beets – I’ve been enjoying beets from the CSA this year. Instead of always making fruit beety with them, I’ve be using them one at a time: raw in salads, in soups with potatoes (adds color!), and slivered for stir frying with other veggies. I like them well enough, I’ll buy them at the grocery store after the season for them via the CSA is over!

Illustrated timeline presents women’s fashion every year from 1784-1970 – A little history. I remember from the late 50s onwards and was making many of my own clothes from the mid-60s…so the styles for those years look familiar. I made a dress for myself that looked very similar to the 1966 dress about 1967!

The animals thriving in the Anthropocene – A study done by a team based near where I live in Maryland! Mosquitos, cockroaches, rats, deer, house sparrows…a few of the organisms are thriving while others are declining…or even becoming extinct.

Medieval Manuscripts are a DNA Smorgasbord – Much can be learned from the debris scraped away during cleaning of old manuscripts: DNA from bookworms and humans plus the animals that became parchment. So – we learn history from the physical aspects of manuscripts as much as well as from the words on the pages!

Magnificent Photos of Canyons Carved over Millions of Years –  Antelope Canyon and Canyon X…in Arizona. My husband already wants to plan a vacation to the place.

Ancient DNA used to track Mesa Verde exodus in 13^th century – Another item in the gleanings for this week about a place near Antelope Canyon…Mesa Verde. When I visited years ago, the mystery of where the people went was unresolved although many assumed they came part of the Pueblo peoples in New Mexico. This study used DNA of turkeys! Evidently the Mesa Verde people raised turkeys for feathers and food…and they took the turkeys with them when they migrated to the Northern Rio Grande area north of Santa Fe, NM.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 5, 2017

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #98 – This set includes a kestrel!

View and Print in 3D more than 200 Objects from the British Museum – If you can’t go to the museum itself, these 3D renderings are the next best thing. And you can look at them whenever you want!

Here are UNESCO’s Newest World Heritage Sites – There are so many unique places to explore.

How a guy from a Montana trailer park overturned 150 years of biology – The researcher that overcame challenges of early life….and figured out that lichen was made of more than a fungus and an alga.

The dizzy history of carousels begins with knights – A little history. I was surprised that it starts with a training game for Arabian and Turkish warriors in the 12 century!

16 best train trips in the world – I’ve never taken an extended train trip…only short ones for fall foliage in Maryland and Pennsylvania – or scenic areas in Arizona. Maybe a train trips will be my substitute for long road trips.

Paul Hawken on One Hundred Solutions to the Climate Crises – Focusing on solutions rather than the problem…of course.

Look Ma, No Break! You’ll Drive Electric Cars with One Pedal – My Prius Prime still has 2 pedals but long term EVs will be changing to 1 pedal to maximize regen breaking…barely using brake pads

These nature photos inspire serious wanderlust – From National Geographic.

Archaeologists discover a ‘Little Pompeii’ in Eastern France -  From the 1^st Century AD…abandoned after catastrophic fires….but the excavation will only last until the end of the year before the construction of a housing complex begins.

Our Neighborhood Streets

The first indication that something was going to happen to our neighborhood streets, were he signs that appeared in late June…and then the big equipment at the front of the neighborhood. The neighborhood is about 25 years old; the streets did not seem that problematic but I was glad the work was being done proactively….and interested in how it would proceeed.

Markings were made on the street around the utility covers and the connections of cul-de-sacs to the primary street into the neighborhood. They started at the front of the neighborhood and scraped off the top few inches of asphalt from a few cul-de-sacs.

The increased heavy equipment traffic caused some break up of asphalt – a sign that it was old enough to be easily damaged.

The big equipment finally removed the asphalt from in front of our house in mid-July. A dump truck moved slowly in front of the big machine to collect the asphalt that was scrapped up. Smaller equipment (Bobcat size) came along and removed chunks of asphalt that the bigger equipment didn’t. And then there were street sweepers. Every night when the work was done for the day, the neighborhood was left tidy.

Ten days later, the asphalting was done in front of our house. The dump truck carrying the surfacing material links with the equipment and then the two pieces move forward and the layer is put on top of the road bed. Big rollers come along behind and compress the material. By the time all that happens – the new layer is flush with the concrete curb.

Our neighborhood looks spruced up with the new street - and the earlier work to replace buckling segments of sidewalk and clear out the clogged water retention pond. 2017 has been a busy year for infrastructure maintenance in our neighborhood!