Back to the beginning...

This one is difficult. Just bear with me...

In the beginning, there was nothing. The picture that probably brings up is empty space and that isn't what I mean. I mean, nothing....

no vacuum, no empty space, no space, no time. There was absolutely nothing. If you can talk about it, there's something. When I say "nothing", that's a thing that wasn't.

In the beginning, there was absolutely nothing....

except...

a singularity.

Everything that exists now existed then compacted into a place with the volume of exactly zero. And the singularity was unstable so at a point in time....no, that's wrong ...there was no point and there was no time....

But the singularity exploded....um, there wasn't anything to exploded into. It expanded rapidly into....well, itself. All of the potential for time and space became actual.

This "Big Bang" happened around 13.8 billion years ago. (Before that, there was no time that would provide a "before"). In the first 10^-10 second (sorry, I don't know how to do exponents with Blogger) the four fundamental energies: gravity, electromagnetic energy, and the nuclear strong and weak forces, were unified and had to unravel themselves. There was no cap on the speed of light, so there was no limit on how quickly the universe expanded.

In the first second, the material component of the universe condensed into the fundamental particles and the universe began sorting itself out into atoms of stuff. It took a few minutes for hydrogen and deuterium to form but after that, things slowed down and it was, oh, a few hundred million years (get used to the big numbers. A hundred million years is a blink of the eye on the geological time scale.) before other elements began to appear. 

You see, hydrogen and deuterium make up stars. Other elements are formed in stars. You have to have stars to have larger atoms in any significant amount. If you don't do something in our universe, things fall apart...they don't stick together and stay stuck. The something that has to happen is stars.

Gravity pulls things together in the universe. It's a weak force but given enough time, it will pull enough hydrogen atoms together to form a huge mass of gas. The pressure at the center becomes so great that it ignites and a star is born.

Okay, there have been whole books written outlining (just outlining!) the process of cosmogenesis, and that's not the purpose of this blog. I'm attempting a "big history" of Walnut Hills.

So I'm going to jump ahead to about 4.6 billion years ago...the birth of our sun. We call it Sun or Sol but it's a fairly mediocre star about halfway through it's life cycle.

At the beginning of our solar system, space debris - gas, dust, and larger particles - had been drifting around for a long time. Under the influence of gravity, the universe had become...chunky. When stuff in a region of space starts attracting each other, they begin as a spherical cloud, but the particles tend to spiral in toward the center and they flatten into a disk (astronomers call it an accretion disk). You can see much of the effect if you spin around in an office chair and hold your arms and legs out in different positions. As you bring them in toward the center of your body, you spin faster. It also matters whether you hold them perpendicular to the axis of spin.

Most of the debris is drawn to the center, but smaller clumps forms along the disk. The central mass collapses until the intense pressure at the center begins crushing hydrogen atoms together to ignite a fusion chain reaction. The center of the dust cloud becomes a star. The clumps of matter spinning around the star become planets and other bodies.

Heavier matter fall further to the center of the disk to form Rocky planets and the outer clumps become icy or gaseous bodies, many of them huge like Jupiter and Saturn. The process is complicated and interesting features form like ring systems, moons, asteroids, and comets.

There is nothing that could be pinpointed as where-Walnut-Hills-will-be, but the third big clump from the sun has started to collapse in on itself, transitioning from a big ball of space debris to a solid ball. That will be our planet, Earth.

Catch the sun

You've probably read that you can't look directly at the sun without damaging your eyes. At an approximation, take that as a fact.

It's not exactly true, though. You can actually look at the sun briefly without burning a hole in your retina. A little longer and you will temporarily wipe out the part of your retinas that the image of the sun fell on. Longer than that and that part of your retina will be permanently out of operation. 

The problem is that everyone is different. If someone tells you that they looked at the sun for three seconds without lasting effects, your eyes might be able to take only one second. And that is why I suggest that you never look directly at the sun.

Your vision is precious. Don't risk it.

The image of the sun on the light sensitive part of your camera will also destroy it in a very short time.

But there are ways to observe the sun. You can get a blurry image with little cost. It's acceptable for viewing solar eclipses but not for detailed solar observation. For that, you will have to put out some cash.

I only do the inexpensive stuff here. This is my solar observation tool kit.

The most common means of viewing the sun is with a pinhole. That's what the silver rectangle is. I cut a small square out of two pieces of card stock (index cards are perfect, and folded a piece of light weight aluminum foil over one side. In the middle of the square hole, I used a pin to punch a tiny hole in the foil. To punch the hole, I placed the foil side down on a hard surface (I used a craft cutting board but a marble table top or similar surface will work fine) and pressed a pin point against it.

Holding the pinhole over another card and using it to project the sun's image, I got the following.

It's...uh, that tiny dot in the center of the black circle...you might have to enlarge the photo. You can move the pinhole nearer and further from the card. When you move it away, the dot gets bigger. The problem is that it also gets dimmer.

A large hole will provide a larger image but it will be dimmer and fuzzier. The main problem is that light from the surrounding area will wash out any details.

I have two inexpensive (but very cool) science kits that include pinhole projects. The white box is from the ScienceWiz: Light kit. I cut a hole, about a half centimeter, into one wall of the box opposite the side that isn't there (the box only has five sides. The missing side has been replaced with wax paper.) When I aim the pinhole at the sun, the sun's image is cast onto the wax paper. The box shields the image from glare.

The hole wasn't very round so the image came out sorta whompsided. A paper punch would have given me better results. But, if you do this project, don't expect to see a lot of details. The big hole is better suited as a pinhole camera for landscapes.

I got a much nicer image by replacing the lenses from a simple refractor telescope kit (the Project STAR telescope bought from Home Science Tools) with a foil pinhole (I punched a pushpin completely through the foil to create a larger pinhole) at one end and wax paper at the other (the kit instructions tell how to build the pinhole tube). 

With a pinhole tube, you can slide the telescoping cardboard tubes in or out to sharpen the image.

You can also use telescoping mailer tubes to create a pinhole tube.

A second way to inexpensively look at the sun is to use a #14 welder filter. It cuts out more than 99% of the sun's light. Eclipse glasses (which are really inexpensive) do much the same thing. Old science kits suggest that you use a candle to coat one side of a microscope slide with soot to create a solar filter. The problem is that it's very easy to scratch away a tiny section of soot and that's all the sunlight you need to blast your retina or a camera CCD into oblivion...not a good idea.

The second photo is zoomed. Zooming with a digital camera won't give you any more details but it will make the image larger (and fuzzier).

The pinhole phenomenon produces an interesting effect during an eclipse as spaces between leaves on trees act as pinholes to cast images of the sun onto the ground.

These methods will give you great images of an eclipse. (See the blog for August 21, 2017 for images of the last total eclipse in Colorado.) For observing the sun in detail, you need something that will either project a cool image (a lens will just start fires), or a special filter. You can buy a special telescope called a sunspotter for a little over a hundred dollars. With it, you can see sunspots and flares.

You can use a sun filter (or welder filter) with a scope but the filter has to go over the objective lens and it has to cover the objective completely. You can get a sun filter for most telescopes and some binoculars. Here's my Carson telephoto lens on my smartphone with a #14 welder filter between it and the sun.

Here, you can see the sun's corona. The bubble at the upper right of the image is an artifact, but you can just see a solar flare below it. This is about the best I can do with my set up. Any sunspots would be masked by the general brilliance of the sun's image.

You can project the image if the sun through a scope but keep in mind that things (the scope's optics, the surface you project onto, whatever's under that...) will quickly heat up.

If you want to seriously get into solar observation, the sunspotter telescope is one way to go.

Another is an H alpha filter. It filters out all light except a very narrow band from the hydrogen spectrum (thus, it's name). It's expensive but it will show you incredible solar details. It will also block light pollution in urban settings.

Professional astronomers use radio, ultraviolet, and infrared telescopes (in addition to their regular telescopes) to get their solar images. For a lot of cool images of our hot sun, check out Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun).

As a curious astronomy observer, you don't have to spend a lot of money to watch space and most of the inexpensive pieces of equipment are also very portable so you can easily carry them on the trail. With a little more money, you can turn astronomy into a hobby that can grow to any level.

The sun is a fascinating object to track but be safe and enjoy it.

Do you know your north?

Heh. In the Denver area, that's easy.

That's west. (See the Rockies?)

That's east. No mountains. In fact, when you top that hill, it's plains as far as you can see...all the way to the Mississippi River, 600 miles away. They don't call the Great Plains "Great" for nothing.

Facing the Rockies, north is to your right.

But why should you care?

Let's say that you're hiking somewhere other than Denver and you suddenly realize that you don't know where you are? Even if you have a map, you have to orient the map to your surroundings and the way you do that is to point north on your map (there will be a symbol pointing north just for that reason) toward geographic north.

You could just choose a direction and start walking. Surely a straight line will bring you to a road or stream or something you can follow out.

The problem there is that humans are very bad at walking in straight lines. They're much better at circles. People have a dominant side. If they're right handed, their stronger right side tends to push them to the left.

The way to walk in a straight line is to find a landmark and walk to it. When you get there, sight back to where you came from and extend that line of sight in the direction you're going, find another landmark, and walk there. Repeat.

But it's best if you have some idea of where you're going. Do you remember a road to the east of you? Is there a town somewhere to the southwest? Your reference is north.

When you face north, east is to your right, west is to your left, and south is behind you. And the sky will always tell you where north is. 

At night, Polaris, the pole star is due north (actually, it is off by about a degree but it's good enough for navigating on land.) If you know any objects in the sky, you should know Polaris, the Big Dipper, and Orion. The Big Dipper is hard to miss because it looks very much like a...well, big dipper. The two stars in the outer edge of the dipper are called the "pointer stars" because they point straight up at Polaris.

(South of the equator, Polaris australia is a very dim star, so you have to find where it should be by following the upright of the Southern Cross.)

If you find Polaris, you've found north so just walk straight toward...oh, wait, it's night. You shouldn't be walking around in a strange forest at night. Just wait until morning and, okay, where was Polaris, again?

Well, look for moss on a tree.

Eh, that's not a reliable way to find north. Moss likes sunshine and most of the sun in the Northern Hemisphere comes in from the South so, yes, mosses like southern exposures but they grow where they can. In dense forests, you can't trust them.

So, here's one.

Set up a vertical post (what astronomers call a "gnomon" - a rod used to cast a shadow or sight some object) and, at the top of its shadow, drive another rod into the ground. In about an hour, come back and place another rod at the tip of the gnomon's shadow (it will have moved). Strike a line from the gnomon halfway between the other two rods - that points north. A line from the second rod to the third points east.

The idea is that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and in the northern hemisphere, the sun is to the South, so the sun's shadow points north and moves from west to east. The problem is that this method depends on when you mark the shadows.

In the picture above, a line drawn from the rod at the left to the nearest rod points due north because I placed them at solar noon (not at Daylight Savings Time noon). At solar noon the sun is due South.

If you place the rods an equal time before and after noon, this method works.

Don't know what time it is? Well, start before noon and place small markers every so often at the ends of the gnomon shadow - maybe use little rocks or stick small twigs in the ground. Where the end of the shadow is closest to the gnomon - that's solar noon. Draw a line from the gnomon to that point and you have north.

If you spend a lot of time outdoors and pay attention to where the sun is, you can get to where you can just look at the sun and tell about what time it is and where north is.

Keep in mind that, in the Southern Hemisphere, you have to look for where the southern pole star would be if you could see it, and the sun will be in the north during the day.

Photos during the time of ...

(With apologies to Mr. Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Avoiding everything is getting old and is certainly cramping my style, but slowing the transmission of a novel virus has its points.

I've mostly been wandering around close to home. People are out socially distancing. It is certainly a time to be out observing social behavior under atypical circumstances.

How are people behaving around you? How are you reacting to the different situations?

I've been back to Fiddler's Green to see more of the statues and I walked down Little Dry Creek Trail to look at Holly Reservoir. Here are some photos.

A reminder of the old west in modern Arapahoe County.

That odd little mound near Arapahoe Station.

An ensemble at Plaza Tower One, Village Center. A bear, plates falling down and some logs.

The elephant puzzled me until I saw the mouse on the pavement in front of it.

Denver likes murals.

This wild boar looks like a matching statue over near Englewood Station. Much of the art in this area is also part of the Denver Museum of Open Air Art. 

This piece of modern art...well, I'll let the artist explain it….

Giraffes!

They're still working on Marjorie Park.

There are extravagant water features all around Denver. This one is at the apartments called "The Cascades". I suspect there's a little nose twerking of nature here in the high desert.

Pike's peak from Quebec.

Another consequence of the virus.

A photo I took of the sun through a welder filter. You know that photographing the sun directly will damage your digital camera, right?

Interesting tunnel under Arapahoe on Little Dry Creek Trail. It's blocked now but maybe later...

Little Dry Creek at Holly Park

Mount Evans from Holly Park. They're done nice views from this little park on Little Dry Creek Trail.

Holly Park

Although Little Dry Creek is almost never dry, Holly Reservoir usually is. Like many stream constructions in the area, Holly Reservoir is a buffer in case of flash floods.

If you want to hike the whole thing, Little Dry Creek Trail begins at Yosemite near Briarwood and Davies Streets and runs about 4 miles to the Highline Canal. It's a well maintained trail, easy at sections but the stretch along Arapahoe is a constant grade that can wear you out after a time. It grades up toward the east.

One of the socially acceptable activities during the time of The Virus is hiking. If you're into biking, that's okay, too.