mk5 adventures

turbodb · Apr 2, 2024

mk5[OP] said: ↑

4. NTS

Teapot-Hornet (1955, 4 kT) -- Wikipedia

There’s almost nowhere else I’ve wanted to visit as much as this place -- over 900 nuclear bombs were detonated here! It’s now known as the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), but I prefer the more historic nomenclature: Nevada Test Site (NTS). Either way, the fact you can tour this place as an ordinary human is simply amazing, given the utterly profound developments that unfolded here, and the extreme secrecy that surrounded it.

Location: Tour departs from the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas. (Note that the museum doesn't run or coordinate the tours.)

How to get a tour: Monitor the tour webpage, note when tours will be released for reservation, then hawk over the site to sign up the instant they're made available. Note that this occurs infrequently, a̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶a̶p̶p̶e̶n̶!̶ Correction – just happened. My bad -- better luck next year!

Availability: Scarce--tours are offered monthly, but are in extremely high demand.

Cost: Free! But it's based out of Vegas, so you should tip your guide and the bus driver.

Duration: Full day--must arrive by 7:30AM, returns around ~5PM.

Photography: Strictly illegal--absolutely no cameras, cellphones, or electronic recording or communication devices allowed. You get a handful of low-resolution group photos afterwards, though.

Camping/lodging: Given early departure, I recommend getting a hotel in Vegas. Be advised that the hotel/casino immediately adjacent to the museum is run-down, gross, and depressing... despite the upbeat and highly misleading webpage.

Dining: Tour stops are provided for a quick breakfast snack (Mercury) and a leisurely lunch (Yucca Flat). These are cafeterias, and the experience is fantastic, but bring snacks and a water bottle for the bus. Leave the flask at home though.

Book pairing: The Baneberry Vent: A Geologist Remembers -- an especially fascinating narrative. Definitely bring a book to read, though, it’s a long drive.

Other notes:

Available to US Persons only; must provide identifying information for background check; must present with RealID or equivalent photo identification.

No backpacks allowed, bags must be clear, essentially no electronic or optical devices allowed (except for eyeglasses).

Not strenuous, rather little walking... but be prepared for desert climate.

Do not fuck around—a literal busload of other people don’t want to find out. The cold war never ended and the peace dividend is long-since spent. So sit down, follow the rules, and enjoy the fleeting illusion of a hollow global peace with the rest of us.

Hidden beyond sight of any highway in the Nevada Desert lies a major battleground of the most expensive war ever waged--the Cold War.

Threats had been a normal part of all wars for all times... perhaps a prelude to battle, perhaps a currency of negotiation... but certainly not the main part of the whole entire war. The Cold War gave us a bizarre and new kind of war, a war of threats, made possible by a new and terrifying kind of threat.

The beginning, Trinity (1945) -- New Mexico

I’m not talking about that post-9/11 “threat level orange” bullshit, either. I’m talking about decade after decade of calculated, articulated, demonstrated, non-stop escalating threats of literal global annihilation. Fuck the airport security charade... duck and cover, motherfucker!

When I say I’m at threat-level orange, it means that I ate too much ice cream and urgently need to find a bathroom. (Luckily, we haven’t reached threat-level red since the Sizzler incident back in ‘08.)

Now, there are two key prongs to proper nuclear war-mongering: demonstration, development, and stockpiling. Astute readers will note I’ve listed three things, but the third one is boring, so it doesn’t get to be a prong. In short, cold-war participants are tasked with demonstrating their current capabilities to substantiate their thinly veiled if not overt threats, while also frantically developing even-more-terrifying weapons to substantiate even-worse threats in the future. NTS was instrumental on both fronts, but really did the heavy lifting on the latter front, with the more prominent events of the former unfolding in the Pacific, at a safer distance from anyone who wasn’t a pacific islander or an unlucky Japanese fisherman:

To convince your enemies you can wipe them off the face of the earth... give earth’s face a convincing wipe! (This one was named Mike.)

Despite the utter success of early US nuclear arms development, the early weapons were unwieldy, expensive, and difficult to stockpile. They were also terrifyingly dangerous, which was kind of the point, but we kept inadvertently almost nuking ourselves and our allies, so there was room for improvement -- at least probably if you asked the places we almost accidentally nuked, including: Canada, Greenland, Ohio, New Mexico, California, Spain, Florida, Canada, Europe, North Carolina, South Carolina, Canada, East Carolina, the Pacific Ocean, Maryland, South Dakota, Texas, England, New England, Louisiana, Korea, New Jersey, Canada, Morocco, Snow, Kentucky, Anywhere With Trees, the Number Seven, and the Letter F.

There was also a slightly shorter list of places we had actually nuked on purpose--I suspect those places were in favor of having safer nuclear weapons too, and could probably also offer the best argument for ‘none at all’ if only that were an option. In any case, there was a clear need to improve the technology. Not just to glass even more communists, but to make it easier, safer and cheaper to do so, and hopefully maybe to reduce the odds of nuking such places as “Canada” and “Oops, Canada again” in the process.

And that’s really where NTS comes into play. This is where the US perfected nuclear weapons. Not the only place, of course--they dreamed them up and built them elsewhere. But this was the premier science lab.

Teapot-Turk (Wikipedia)

And I really mean that: perfected. They say nothing is perfect, but nuclear weapons are damn-near perfect.

Think about what they are designed to do... have been proven to do. Think about how many were built, and how many remain active today—launch-ready in missile silos and submarines, zipping overhead in aircraft as we idle impatiently in traffic and swipe at cellphone screens in states of catatonic consumption...

Now ponder the fact that these silos, submarines, and nuclear bombers are staffed by humans, and that all humans make mistakes. And no disrespect to our armed forces, but have you met the folks that work there? They’re almost as crazy and reckless as the rest of us!

Next, and not to divulge national secrets, consider that bombs are probably made from bomb parts, just like a car or a computer is made from car or computer parts. You probably don’t drive a 40-year-old car or use a 1980s computer today, and if so, you’ve probably needed lots of parts to keep it working. But this is around how long it’s been since our nuclear arsenal was under active wartime development, meaning that some designs are very old, and newer designs haven’t been tested like older designs were—by blowing them up to see if they work. (I think today, they almost blow them up to see if they almost work?)

For nearly all of us, nukes have been around, locked and loaded, since before we were born. When we called our teachers ‘mom,’ when we shit our pants in gym class, when we got caught driving drunk or screwing the intern again... when the levees burst, when the markets crashed, when the wall fell, when the planes hit the towers, and when we lost—are you kidding me—not one but TWO fucking space shuttles. Go back further... nearly eight decades of fuck-ups and shit-luck spanning everything everywhere—and not a single nuclear bomb has ever detonated unintentionally. Anywhere. Not even the Soviets fucked this up, and they gave us Chernobyl.

That’s what I mean by perfection. Imagine if we could do anything else so perfectly, like roads, healthcare, or education. Our kids would think so good, plus sports win and bridge stay up! Oh well... if nuclear bombs are on the list, I guess that’s the most important one to get right.

NTS is where they got it right. Not the only such place, of course... the physics were first worked-out and tested in New Mexico, immediately wielded to great effect against Japan, later retested in curiosity in the distant Pacific, and perhaps might have been forever shelved. But once it became clear that the atomic age would unfold as an insane two-player no-limits game of bluff, the Nevada Proving Grounds sprung to life in the Nevada Desert in 1951, dazzling the burgeoning metropolis of Las Vegas with midnight sunshine and distant mushroom clouds—wagers of bizarre and escalating stakes beyond the imagination of even the most hopelessly reckless casino gambler.

Welcome to NTS

Vast swaths of land in the west had been requisitioned for wartime activities in the decade prior, so I suppose this was no different. Whatever had been here before, was suddenly somewhere else, and fences and guard stations were thrown up overnight to ensure that whatever would hence unfold, would be largely shrouded in secrecy.

Not that you can truly keep a secret this big... we’re taking about explosions into the 100 kT range here. (I guess the South Africans pulled it off once... but in a distant ocean, not 900 times right next to Las Vegas.) And in any case, the secret wasn’t the big bhang itself, it was everything else... the recipes in particular -- decades of secrecy, much still classified, regarding the most-secret and spiciest “special sauce” ever concocted.

So of course the world would get a taste from time to time. After departing Mercury, on the way in to Frenchman Flat, we pass the tasting room: a historic row of benches just past the saddle:

I stole this from Google... not sure who took it or posted it on the internet. But thanks, whoever.

Here, important people, politicians, and members of the press once watched live nuclear detonations take place upon the distant Frenchman Flat. No spending program can live forever in secrecy, at least not in this country. Gotta loop in the public, or at least make them feel looped-in. Broadcast it in in prime-time. Find sponsors...

NNSS

The benches are falling apart today... some seven decades later.

Icecap

Cut forward to the final moments of US nuclear testing. Actually, it was a British weapon: The Icecap site.

The bus door opened in the shadow of a 150-foot tall tower--a looming white rectangle shrouded in windowless corrugated metal save for the hatches along a precarious external stairway at one corner. And a door at ground level, through which we will funnel once our host figured out the lock combo following a lengthy radio call.

A photo from the construction phase... the tower is even taller today, I think, and the cranes are long gone. (NNSS)

This was built to test a UK weapon, up to 150 kT, intended for delivery via a high-altitude rocket, perhaps a cruise missile (our host said, but I forgot). This would mean that the warhead would reach near-cryogenic temperatures in flight – so, someone must have wondered... would it still work?

NNSS

Within the tower, a two-story-tall rusting cryostat still hangs from cables above, housing whatever science package had been devised for this test. We took turns giving it a push. It was massive, but swung free. Beneath our feet, below a false floor, a 1600-foot vertical shaft had been drilled, into which this experiment would be placed, then buried to contain the blast. I believe the cryostat was to be packed with dry ice, but owing to the various cryogen lines lying about, I suspect LN2 was to be used as well, to achieve the desired thermal conditions once emplaced. Or perhaps compressed CO2? I forget. Countless other bundles of cables and hoses radiated from the bore, in seemingly all directions, coiled up atop each other, most leading to the dozen-plus weathered instrumentation trailers surrounding the test site. Their distance was determined by the expected diameter of the subsidence crater, into which we would instantly fall should this aborted chapter of history suddenly unfold off-script today. Near the door, a display table shows us samples of the various cables and fibers used to convey critical signatures of the blast to surface instrumentation. I don’t know a lot about nuclear testing, but I know a hell of a lot about instrumentation. Optical fibers. Coaxial cables. Cleanly cross-sectioned for us to ponder the cladding, the conductors, the insulators... I can tell a lot about what kind of signals these cables were designed to carry. But I have no idea what they would have meant.

NNSS

And this chapter of history was indeed aborted quite abruptly. Apparently it was a call from the White House:

“Hello?”

“Hey, this is Bill at the White House. The Cold War is over!”

“Great, I’ll let the team know, thanks!”

“You’re welcome, bye!”

Everyone just shrugged and went home. And that was like 30 years ago.

Apparently, in recent years, a British scientist, on a bus tour, asked permission to enter one of the trailers to retrieve his lab notebook. Perhaps more surprising, the request was granted, only for the plan to fall through when he couldn’t recall the combination lock at the door. So I can only assume his lab notebook is still there, frozen in time within this bizarre snapshot of history—an intricate yet temporary emplacement of scientific equipment all designed to record the violent chaos of a few microseconds, against all odds, now a permanent display of an abrupt, fragile, and somehow lasting peace.

Another point of discussion, the details of which I’ve sadly forgotten, involved someone falling down the shaft. I forget if it happened at this shaft, or a different one. But tragically, it happened--someone, perhaps several people, had died this way. And someone in our group, knew the family of someone who had fallen. I forget if they were able to retrieve the body, but I remember taking a step back from the shaft.

Sedan

Sedan shot (Wikipedia)

There was also brief era in which hope prevailed, that nuclear weapons could be used for “peaceful” applications. After all, conventional explosives had enabled decades of mining, drilling, and civil engineering projects at unprecedented and ever-increasing scale. Could nuclear explosives unlock a new era of mineral or petroleum productivity, or speed the construction of the nation’s new interstate highway system? Looking at you, I-40 east of Ludlow...

The answer was obviously the-fuck not, but that didn’t stop them from trying. Not only here, but in, like, Colorado. And Arkansas. No joke. But the high-water mark for this whole mindset – the program known as ‘Plowshare’ – took place here at NTS in July 1962: The Sedan shot.

Sedan crater – 1300 feet wide, 300 feet deep. 12 million tons of "job done, boss!" Note viewing platform at lower right.

They literally designed this one to move as much earth as possible. Which... is exactly what causes radioactive fallout. “But...” I’m assuming someone argued, “it would move soooo much earth! What’s a little fallout for moving so much earth?” The committee must have agreed.

Tour group at the Sedan Crater.

Sedan contributed significantly to public exposure to radioactive fallout – essentially tied for first place in NTS history with a 1952 shot. Interestingly, I was born in one of the counties most heavily impacted by its fallout. Didn't know 'till today.

The gun

If you're thinking of the "atomic cannon" gun... well that did actually happen here:

But that isn't the gun on this tour. In fact, I think I saw the atomic cannon on display in Bettendorf, IA, but I don't have a picture.

NTS wasn’t just a place of showmanship, it was a place of science. Bizarre, balls-to-the-wall science. And as an example... apparently they did science with this gigantic battleship gun:

I have been a scientist for a few decades, and I have yet to do any science with a battleship gun. And I’m not talking about the science where you are trying to study battleship guns—that would make sense, but I’m not that kind of scientist. But neither were the folks that used this battleship gun at NTS. So I’m talking about the kind of science that is so crazy, where you can look around and say, “hey, what if we just put our science shit in a gigantic battleship gun on a hillside, and pointed it at this other even-crazier shit?” and everyone else says “yes, that is a good idea,” and then a few weeks later someone shows up and gives you a battleship gun.

That is the kind of science I long for. Instead I am researching renewable energy, which is super important now, but only because environmentalists in the 1970s ruined our one and only chance to actually prevent global warming. I don’t get to use battleship guns to research batteries and solar cells—at least not yet. But long before the entitled ignorance of environmentalism had scuttled a generation of unprecedented technological innovation, before misguided self-righteousness could thwart the hard-fought pathway to a carbon-neutral 1990s, and before the modern plague of intellectual subversion disguised as social activism would emerge as a permanent cultural boat-anchor to ensure a future of superficial profitability rather than decisive or meaningful progress... back then, folks out here in the Nevada desert were unlocking the secrets of nuclear power at a slightly faster, more promptly critical timescale... somehow, with a fucking battleship gun.

Viewed without the idiot tourist leaning on the barrel... (NNSS)

Just up the road from here is the gate to Groom Lake. Area 51. All that alien shit. You don’t get close enough to even see the gate, but you can have fun talking about it on the bus!

Lunch

And then lunch. Damn, I really wish I had pictures to share. Imagine going back to the 1950s, and you are a nuclear test scientist in the Nevada desert... perhaps you worked all morning hooking up instruments and taking readings. Or maybe you just sat in your battleship gun, pointing it around and making battleship-gun noises with your mouth.

BtTCHCHOOOOWWWSSsshhczczczczcz... ka-POW!

cachunk-cachunk, vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... vrrrrrrr... vrrr vrrr vr

BtTCHCHOOOOWWWSSsshhczczczczcz... ka-POW!

Mission accomplished – time for a cheeseburger. Head over to the cafeteria.

Well, it’s not the 1950s any more, but you can get that same cheeseburger on the tour today, at the same exact cafeteria. I don’t know if that’s true, but either way, this is the most American cheeseburger you will ever eat. Cherish it.

The house

Next up is the true high-point of the tour. Not literally -- I think that would be up at the saddle by the benches -- but this is what you came for. If this were an art museum, this is its crème-de-la-Mona-Lisa: The Apple II house.

And all we get is this one picture?

It’s just not enough. I’ve heard a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’m going to cash in some words for a few more.

Words just can't do it justice... the desert floor had burst forth with implausible quantities of green foliage, like hopelessly-out-of-gamut in all directions, and some of it was still in bloom. Then, these puffy clouds rolled in to punctuate the sky with patches of ominously deep blues, silhouetted by delightful fringes of yellow, with trailing whisps tending towards pink and purples in their shadows as the day went on, but still long before the sun approached the horizon. Then the winds whipped up the perfect amount of late-afternoon haze, offering spectacularly vivid depth gradients over the lakebed.

And as this unfolded, we rolled up on this dilapidated wooden house in the middle of nowhere... not just any house, but THE iconic house that we've all seen in footage of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing--you know, the one that instantly bursts into flames moments before being blown to splinters by the passing shockwave?

Okay, well obviously this wasn't that specific house. It was an identical one they built a bit further away... just far enough that it didn't get blown to splinters. But there's no doubt, this is an atom-bombed house -- likely the finest such specimen still standing today, and certainly the only one I've gotten to see in person.

So there we were at this historical structure, milling about its doorstep, gazing in awe at its sun-bleached timbers--its white paint long gone, the shards of its shattered windows long since swept away, the lifeless mannequins once posed to simulate its misfortunate human habitants apparently returned to the department stores from which they were borrowed...

And that's when I stumbled upon it. The most-perfect photographic composition I'd ever encounter. Right directly in front of me. And I didn't have a fucking camera!

Looking squarely at this iconic relic of mankind's most terrifying battleground; its aging exterior gleaming in the afternoon sunlight... I gazed through the empty frame that once held its living room window, and saw perfectly centered on the opposite wall an identical empty window frame, distanced from the former on all sides by the converging orthogonal textures of the intricate woodwork that once supported floor, wall, and ceiling treatments. And there, centered in the lower third of the view through these perfectly aligned window frames, perhaps a few hundred yards in the distance, stood another lonesome house of seemingly identical construction -- this one made from brick, but the distinction barely resolvable at such distance. What was clear, despite the distance, was its surreal lifelessness; even from here appearing empty, hopeless, and colorless amidst the sea of green desert foliage and glistening sunlight separating it from my vantage point. Beyond, the desert floor gradually gave way to the muted tan hues of the distant lake bed, which incidentally had borne the brunt of post atmospheric-test-ban underground weapons testing, its surface forever scarred by seemingly countless craters of varying size, each bearing a unique and name and purpose in our nation's history. Of course the craters couldn't be resolved from here; the lakebed appeared through the golden haze of dusty afternoon winds just like any of the countless dry lakes dotting the region. Towering beyond, the landscape was capped by the subtly deep oranges and magentas of distant mountains, finally yielding to the infinitely deep blue late-afternoon sky for the upper third of the frame, punctuated by the contrast of a single perfectly-centered sunlit cloud:

Best photo I never took

It was utterly profound... surreal. The rest of this report has been pieced together from withering fragments of fading memories... but this image remains seared vividly in my consciousness. I really wish y’all could have been there.

There was more to the tour, but I’m getting tired of typing. I absolutely devoured the book recommended above, and cannot recommend it strongly enough. It really brought the history to life.

Soon we were back in Vegas, inching through rush-hour traffic back to the museum. To the left... a massive sphere projected vividly colorful animations on its surface – the latest over-the-top multibillion-dollar Vegas megaproject. It would soon host its first show, an Irish rock band, but today it was advertising... I forget, perhaps a software company, or a hemorrhoid cream. The whole sphere would probably fit in the Sedan crater, I speculated, but it makes better sense to build it here in town. To the right, a junkie writhed face-down on the sidewalk as tourists briskly sidestepped the commotion. I imagined the ground shaking and a mushroom cloud rising to the north...

Now... that's a proper Vegas show.
Click to expand...

All of these stories are good, but this one is fantastically priceless. I read large chunks of it to @mrs.turbodb and she laughed too.

Made me realize that my real calling in life was to be a battleship gun scientist. Well, maybe a retired battleship gun scientist.

DVexile · Apr 2, 2024

At China Lake they did a lot of "science with guns". The funniest story was of a program to precisely measure the muzzle velocity of a naval 5" gun. They built a fancy optical contraption full of circuitry to measure the projectile speed as it exited the muzzle. Basically a little equipment rack with a hole down the center of it for the projectile to travel. The idea was you put this on the end of the barrel...

If you are familiar with guns you will recognize that a thing with a hole down the center of it that you put at the end of the barrel has a name: a muzzle brake. But this one wasn't built of steel, nor was it welded to the end of the gun.

One of those things stupidly obvious in retrospect, but somehow it escaped everyone on the program and on the range. Until the first test, in which on the very first shot the very expensive and fancy muzzle velocity measuring apparatus (a.k.a. improperly designed muzzle brake) flew hundreds of yards down range before impacting the desert floor.

End of program.

mk5 · Apr 2, 2024

DVexile said: ↑

At China Lake they did a lot of "science with guns". The funniest story was of a program to precisely measure the muzzle velocity of a naval 5" gun. They built a fancy optical contraption full of circuitry to measure the projectile speed as it exited the muzzle. Basically a little equipment rack with a hole down the center of it for the projectile to travel. The idea was you put this on the end of the barrel...

If you are familiar with guns you will recognize that a thing with a hole down the center of it that you put at the end of the barrel has a name: a muzzle brake. But this one wasn't built of steel, nor was it welded to the end of the gun.

One of those things stupidly obvious in retrospect, but somehow it escaped everyone on the program and on the range. Until the first test, in which on the very first shot the very expensive and fancy muzzle velocity measuring apparatus (a.k.a. improperly designed muzzle brake) flew hundreds of yards down range before impacting the desert floor.

End of program.
Click to expand...

Well, in my reloading days, I had to buy a second chronograph to complete my first three-shot average. I believe this is called the 'learning curve.'

Bet that thing made a glorious crunch on impact.

turbodb said: ↑

All of these stories are good, but this one is fantastically priceless. I read large chunks of it to @mrs.turbodb and she laughed too.

Made me realize that my real calling in life was to be a battleship gun scientist. Well, maybe a retired battleship gun scientist.
Click to expand...

You and me both, man. But then again, I'd be the guy whooping and grinning as the instrument package belly-flopped a half-mile downrange. And from what I can tell, the past few decades haven't gone too well for naval gun development in the US--Ken's hilarious anecdote aside.

Oh well, nowadays all the big money is in software (or hemorrhoid cream--I forget).

Just_A_Guy · Apr 2, 2024

DVexile said: ↑

At China Lake they did a lot of "science with guns". The funniest story was of a program to precisely measure the muzzle velocity of a naval 5" gun. They built a fancy optical contraption full of circuitry to measure the projectile speed as it exited the muzzle. Basically a little equipment rack with a hole down the center of it for the projectile to travel. The idea was you put this on the end of the barrel...

If you are familiar with guns you will recognize that a thing with a hole down the center of it that you put at the end of the barrel has a name: a muzzle brake. But this one wasn't built of steel, nor was it welded to the end of the gun.

One of those things stupidly obvious in retrospect, but somehow it escaped everyone on the program and on the range. Until the first test, in which on the very first shot the very expensive and fancy muzzle velocity measuring apparatus (a.k.a. improperly designed muzzle brake) flew hundreds of yards down range before impacting the desert floor.

End of program.
Click to expand...

The cherry on top… do you know who paid for that failure of a program?

Cwopinger · Apr 7, 2024

mk5[OP] said: ↑

4. NTS

Teapot-Hornet (1955, 4 kT) -- Wikipedia
Click to expand...

I just wanted to say thanks for an informative and entertaining post. Now if you will excuse me, I have a collection of open tabs of nuclear accidents and oddities to read.

mk5 · Apr 11, 2024

Trip update...

I have traveled quite far. The food is amazing. The people are friendly. The river looks delightful, but the lifeguards are heavily armed. That part seems especially bizarre. But, most importantly... the weather forecast shows increasing hope for tomorrow.

Next day update: Totality isn't a time to mess with a camera, so here's my blurry contribution to redundancy:

What can I say... I barely tried. But apparently my camera doesn't autofocus correctly on the solar corona.

Edit: Carlos took this one on his phone!

Good photos or not, this is something you just have to see yourself. Only then can you fully understand why. Kind of like the Grand Canyon. Or to a lesser degree, a really big flag waving in the evening breeze.

Until you gaze upon such a majestic and mesmerizing flag, you cannot understand how a flag could be so majestic and mesmerizing.

The day's memes were on-point as well... me gusta this one the most:

Muy bien

Back-home-again update: I've taken longer trips to more exotic places, but this one will forever rank among the most epic -- not just for its profoundly spectacular main event, but for the uncharacteristically good fortune that prevailed despite what could or should have been major setbacks at nearly every turn. This wasn't just another saga of my piss-poor planning and decision making skills. Those of course set the stage -- but here, a smorgasbord of mechanical problems joined the cast -- starting when my new master cylinder blew its secondary on day one, continuing with the failure of a CV boot and axle seal some time afterwards, and culminating with two ruined tires as the resulting hemorrhaging of lubricants and abjectly inadequate braking joined forces to jar my alignment cams from "hopefully close enough" to "completely fucked" a thousand miles away from home. I'm talking left-hand cruise-control, that's how completely fucked my alignment is. And while I normally carry the tools necessary to at least partially unfuck this type of situation, I currently have no idea where those tools are, except that they aren't in my truck.

Yet here I am, safe at home, copying five thousand pictures off the camera and cherishing the new friendships formed across three time zones and two countries.

Now... for double bonus points: anyone recognize these two cold-war landmarks, at which I camped on the drive home?

There's no daylight in that second photo, although the distant glow isn't entirely manmade either... Both shots were taken around 3AM local time.

mk5 · Apr 15, 2024

Voluntober

Given the glowing reception to the "tours of the Mojave" series... I present: another four-part installation of loosely connected trip reports.

The theme here was supposed to be four back-to-back weekends of volunteering adventures in the great American Southwest, all during October of last year.

Hence: Voluntober.

Did I succeed? Of course not. But I had a good time, and eventually put in four weekends worth of "effort" ... so let's get started with one of them:

Weekend 1: Joshua Trees!

As previously discussed, the 40,000-acre Dome fire of 2020 dealt a catastrophic blow to the spectacular Joshua Tree forests surrounding Cima Dome in Mojave National Preserve. This had been the largest and densest Joshua Tree forest on earth... not that the national park named for the things further to the south doesn't have plenty of them to offer. But this place had a gazillion times more, with a bazillion times less tourists, and a kazillion more miles of unpaved back-country roads to explore. I'm not 100% sure about those numbers, but the point is that this place was uniquely amazing, but then it all burned to shit, and that sucks.

The NPS staff here have instigated an ambitious plan to replant the forests, making use of volunteer labor to plant and water seedlings throughout the region, and to rigorously document each step of the process to allow tree-by-tree analysis and study the effectiveness of the various techniques and efforts, in a scientifically meaningful way. The goal is to reduce the time-scale of reforestation from what would likely have been many centuries (if ever), to perhaps just several decades. That's still a long time, of course, and the sad reality is that you and I will probably never again see these forests at their former glory. Your grandchildren might, though--thanks to this effort. And thank god I got to enjoy these forests myself for several years before they burned -- otherwise I would need to procreate so my grandchildren could see them or whatever. Yikes.

In any case, this is one hell of a fantastic volunteer event, combining many of my favorite things, including:
1. Randomly walking around in the desert
2. Tedious data entry... for science!
3. Virtue flexing on a truck forum
4. You get to name the trees when you plant them!
5. Like, teamwork or whatever?

Another shout-out to @dman100 for bringing this whole thing to my attention last year. This is now my second year of joining the festivities.

I'll cut to the chase and summarize my contributions this year: I signed up for two weekends, but showed up six hours late on the first day. After not really helping, I drank a ton of beer and incinerated three batches of popcorn at the campfire. Then I wandered around lost in the desert until dawn. I slept through the next day's meet-up, leaving the team both short-handed and concerned about my whereabouts. I eventually caught up with them, but then I accidentally yet repeatedly crashed my truck into a stationary water trailer, which made a deeply embarrassing amount of noise. Confident I had done my best, I bailed early and took the stupidest-possible route home. Finally, two weeks later, for my second weekend of volunteering... I completely fucked off instead of even showing up at all.

What can I say, I'm probably the world's most helpful and reliable volunteer.

Picture time:

Arriving too late to help with the day's initial efforts, I hung out at the ranch in hopes that we could assemble a team for an afternoon trek. Meanwhile, I posted some outreach material on TW:

mk5[OP] said: ↑

Coming to you via starlink wifi (thanks, NPS!) here's a photo of this year's Joshua Tree saplings (?), being planted this weekend at Mojave National Preserve. As well as for the next three weekends -- Saturdays and Sundays thru Nov 12.

These are really good little Joshua Trees, but the problem is that they are in little plastic buckets. They will work even better planted in the ground. And there are plenty of places to plant them, because all the previous trees got too hot so now they're dead.

If you are interested in planting Joshua Trees, consider coming out to Cima Dome tomorrow, or any weekend through Nov 12! You can drive Cima road to get here, even though it's closed for repaving -- but Friday nights through Sunday nights only... Monday thru Thursday the work crews will shoot on sight and bury you in the concrete.

Limited-time bonus: The first 11 people to show up and reference this ad will receive a FREE can of Coors Light**

**subject to rapidly declining availability
Click to expand...

I can't specifically recall if anyone turned out for my promotional offer... but I very quickly exhausted my supply of promotional materials, so maybe it was a huge success.

Luckily I managed to join a group for an afternoon planting despite my late arrival.

Back at the ranch... the golden hour started unfolding.

So naturally I scrambled to the upper reaches of Cima Dome for a better view.

Then, back at the ranch, a delightful campfire unfolded. It took me several tries to get the hang of making Jiffy-Pop again, but I eventually either succeeded, or just got used to the taste of burned popcorn. I forget.

As the evening festivities wound down, I set out on a special assignment. It turned out that one of the day's teams had reached their assigned planting site, only to discover that they were missing one of their wire baskets. These wire baskets are critical for preventing rodents from devouring the fragile saplings -- one should be installed to protect each tree as soon as it is planted. But realizing this shortcoming only after hiking several miles into wilderness, all the team could do was to plant the little tree anyway, then hope someone would be able to return and install this crucial lifeline in time to spare this helpless lone sapling from its otherwise certain fate of becoming rabbit poop.

Well, let me introduce you to the superhero Gotham needs... a Dark Knight fearlessly setting course into the Dark Night. Except it was actually just me stumbling around looking at my cellphone, wishing I knew the words to any of the songs I was trying to sing.

As I had learned on a recent overnight hike in Utah, it is surprisingly difficult to find your way across open terrain in total darkness, even with GPS guidance. And that time I was looking for a geological anomaly the size of a football stadium. This time I was looking for a 3" tall Joshua Tree sapling which might already have been devoured by a rabbit. So however long it took me to stumble upon the planting site, it took me another hour to actually find this little tree.

But I'm glad I did. She's fenced up proper now!

Well that put me in the middle of nowhere at the middle of night -- obviously... it was prime-time for picture-taking.

I used to need drugs to be this euphoric at 3AM.

Now all I need is a moonless sky and a camera on a tripod... and whatever the fuck train-wreck of a midlife-crisis I rode in on.

It was nearly dawn by the time I stumbled back to the truck. In hindsight, it would have helped to walk in the correct direction to start with, instead of only doing that several hours later.

I fell asleep as the eastern skies began taking on their first hues of daylight... then for whatever reason I somehow overslept my alarm some forty minutes later. Awaking much later, I made a frantic rush to base camp only to find it deserted, but based on the markings on the site map, was able to set course and rejoin one of the planting groups just as they were departing their vehicles for the morning's hike.

One of the volunteers, reaching the designated planting site...

Another encounter along the way...

Even though it was fall, there were still tons of flowers, and other randomly beautiful shit adorning this desert hellscape. Like these ridiculous grass curly-cues. Whatever the fuck those even are.

Another important development, in the intervening years since the fire ravaged this place: Not all hope is lost -- there are countless examples of new life resprouting from the charred remains of this once glorious forest... such as this fresh growth at the foot of an otherwise lifeless tree. Between this sparse but critical natural resurgence, and the extensive ongoing replanting efforts at the hands of NPS and volunteers, once can feel a genuine hope that this forest will someday reprise its former glory.

But don't get me wrong, either -- on an absolute scale, the whole entire burn area is completely fucked. It used to be profoundly spectacular, but the best we can hope for today, is to help set the course in a slightly less-fucked direction. The whole place will be completely fucked for the rest of our lives.

So why do we even try? Do we all share some sort of innate deep-rooted altruism--can we truly see beyond our own mortality to acknowledge that the fate of our species and our planet lies literally in our own hands with every passing second?

Absolutely the-fuck not, of course. If I could pave this place over to build a casino, I'd build a whole new Vegas strip. If it held even a barrel of oil, I'd drill it six ways from Sunday and fuck it dry by Christmas. But none of those things are options for me. So instead I'm out here planting these little trees or whatever. Selfishly snapping pictures and spinning this story where I'm the main character, hoping random people will click the "like" button. It's not because I'm a good person. I'm a bad person -- just not any good at it.

And honestly, I think that is humanity's most-redeeming quality. Incompetence. With indifference in close second. It got us this far, right?

Speaking of which, where the fuck even am I?

Looks like I've cruised down the Mojave Trail all the way to Afton Canyon, whilst pondering the human condition out loud. Please forgive my dreadful manners!

Let's take ourselves on a side-trip up to Spooky Canyon--what with this being the Spooktober season and all...

This is such a cool canyon -- practically a cave! Heck, I can barely even see in there, so I am kneeling down to set up the tripod just to take these photos. I'll have to break out the flashlight soon!

JESUS CHRIST

On second thought, fuck this whole entire continent, let's just burn it all and build a nice casino or oil well, okay?

mk5 · Nov 9, 2024

Voluntober weekend 2: Tecopa Mines

Well I kind of already set the stage for this one with that prior writeup. Back to the same place, then. But this time, I'm a volunteer, not a tourist.

Enjoying the night skies...

Did I say I was a good volunteer? Definitely not. If I recall, I showed up for this "volunteer weekend" on... yep: Sunday night. Lost several hours trying to bypass the closures on the 127 before giving up and coming up via Excelsior. Then I missed all of Ross's new gigantic signs in the darkness and wound up careening up the railroad grade, straight into a washout. Good thing my brakes still worked back then.

Then, an F9 launch out of Vandenberg -- right on schedule!

So needless to say, I didn't really do a great deal of volunteering. At least compared to the real volunteers.

I did work my ass off with a shovel for a few hours though. So I wasn't entirely worthless.

Then headed down into the Columbia to see a recently opened section of the mine via this nice new ladder they had just installed. Like, this passage had been sealed off for 50 years until yesterday, or something like that. That was pretty cool!

I could still smell the smoke from the fire that brought down the support timbers, which had sealed this place off all those years ago. Crazy.

We also found... like all sorts of artifacts back there. Probably really great artifacts if you are into that kind of thing.

What really drew my fascination, on the other hand, was having enough time to set up lighting for a few pictures. That was definitely my favorite part, not all the random bits of metal and greasy sticks of dynamite hiding around back there.

I just love this kind of photography.

Well, with that, I headed back home, then in to work. Only 10 hours late on a Monday... not bad for Voluntober!

To skip ahead to part three of this series, click here.

Stuck Sucks · Apr 23, 2024

mk5[OP] said: ↑

2. Ryan
Click to expand...

You inspired me, thanks! We entered the lottery and will be touring Ryan on May 3. Really looking forward to it.

mk5 · Jun 11, 2024

Since the last "guess where I am" post was so wildly popular, here's another geoguesser-type riddle for y'all... where am I?

A failure drives through a failure to go fail at fishing...

Bonus points are on the table.

Cheers y'all.

mk5 · Jul 23, 2024

I have been to ... I think 47 out of 50 states in my life thus far. But I can say with absolute certainty which is the worst:

And wow, I have been absolutely killing it this year with adventuring. In leu of trip reports, I present the odometer plot:

Hopefully someday I'll write this shit up -- it has been epic, despite missing out on several planned adventures earlier this year. Time to go change the oil again. Two more big trips coming up!

turbodb · Jul 28, 2024

mk5[OP] said: ↑

In leu of trip reports
Click to expand...

Lame.

mk5[OP] said: ↑

missing out on several planned adventures earlier this year
Click to expand...

mk5 · Jul 31, 2024

turbodb said: ↑

Lame.
Click to expand...

Thank you for selecting the topic for my next post! Lame.

Or:

Shit, did I just ruin my engine?

So... I might have done some spirited driving the other month...

https://youtu.be/sz8kW1Vm3L4
This is just few seconds long, with no dialog--I promise. Instead you get loud, vulgar music... plus copyright infringement!

Edit: Crap! This one won't embed because I restricted it to 18+, what with its senseless vulgarity. Here's a summary of what you're missing:

Click through to YouTube above for 4k resolution and loud, vulgar music!

This was towards the end of a 4500 mile road trip, yet some 800 miles from home.

Not to point fingers, but someone had suggested I visit the Alvord playa, both for its spectacular scenery, and for the fact that you can drive as fast as you want out there. That naturally leads most visitors reaching this special place to wonder: hey... how fast can I actually drive this thing?

The appeal of this question, and this most unique place to answer it, draws a broader range of people and vehicles than I would have even guessed. Sure, you'll get the regular mix of easy-access back-country traffic: Folks violating the hell out of their rental car contracts... check. Crossover tent crowd... check. Retirees in campers... check. Truck and Jeep idiots... check. (The dumbest of them can be identified by the useless snorkels affixed to their vehicles!)

While you can't drive a proper sports car down this access road--a bit too steep and sandy--you could certainly trailer one here, and I bet plenty of folks have... can't imagine a better place to drive a sports car, other than maybe a race track, or a Wendy's parking lot at 2AM. Most impressively, at various times, people have even set land speed records here -- in fact just in 2019, Jessi Combs set the women's land-speed record of 523 mph before her tragic fatal crash, breaking the 1976 record of 513 mph set by Kitty O'Neil at this very same place.

And although I don't know the legality of it, I would assume this lakebed to be an ideal spot to set down in a bushplane. Heck you could probably land a 747 here without brakes -- it's that big -- although I would recommend making damn sure the ground was completely dry first. In my case, I arrived in an aging pickup truck, but I kept an eye out for air traffic nonetheless, and set up my radios for this purpose as well. Didn't see or hear any planes though.

But here's something I didn't expect to see... because I had no idea this was even a thing:

Tally ho, lads!

That's right: land sailing! This one was a cruiser, ideal for leisurely voyages in the afternoon breeze--but its owner also had a racing model back home that could easily reach highway speeds on gusty days.

Lacking proper rigging and fresh out of mainsheets myself, the question remained... how fast could I drive my particular vehicle: A horrendously overloaded, nearly 20 year old pickup truck, with well over 200k miles on the odometer, embodying all the aerodynamic elegance of a drunkenly hurled brick.

The answer was -- disappointingly -- only 102 mph!

It wasn't for lack of trying. I think I made 6 passes. Not back to back, but I absolutely floored it the whole time, each time... inching asymptotically towards redline in fourth, just trying to reach triple digits. Winds were calm and I had plenty of lakebed to myself, so it essentially came down to the length of the run. It took pretty much the whole length of the lakebed to finally break 100. I'm talking GPS speed, not speedometer-that-you-never-actually-calibrated-for-your-tires speed.

I honestly didn't give it much thought... I have to drop the hammer nearly this hard just to hold freeway speeds against the inexplicably constant gale-force headwinds each time I cross Utah, albeit at slightly lower speeds. And I've cruised this truck at somewhat higher speeds in fifth gear a few times, evidentially benefiting from paved surfaces, downgrades, and/or tailwinds. Of course, driving that fast on public highways is reckless and reproachable. It just happens that in the Great American Southwest, one can find forgotten stretches of pavement more desolate and smooth than even the Alvord playa. Today would simply put that same driving spirit to test on a level playing field, literally and ... well, literally literally -- the lakebed is almost perfectly level. And in any case, today's air temperatures were only in the high 70s, so I didn't even bother to check the fluid temps as I drove. (My dash display was preoccupied waterfalling the air band anyway -- I don't want to be the first guy to crash both a drone and a pickup truck into an airplane!) I certainly didn't see any signs of overheating at any point.

More on this godforesaken abomination in a future post, hopefully...

But... I *might* have pushed it a bit too hard nonetheless. The first clue came the next morning -- already halfway home by then -- the first time the engine had cooled down since my land-speed record attempt. Upon firing up, I heard the familiar 'swoosh' of air in the coolant as it coursed through the heater core. Shit -- last time that happened, it signaled a blown headgasket!

But the truck drove fine the rest of the way home, essentially non-stop, whereafter it sat neglected for another week or two before I urgently readied it for the next trip. It needed a preemptive oil change, and was long-overdue for fresh spark plugs, so this would give me a glimpse into the engine's health.

To my dismay... here's what I found during the tune-up:

1. Pooling fluid in cylinders 3 and 6 observed on the boroscope. Presumably antifreeze, but try as I might, I couldn't fish anything down into those cylinders to actually sample it.

2. The old plugs looked fine, but the compression test was all over the place! As low as 50, and as high as 190. I know how to do a compression test, and I repeated it to make sure. Then I prayed I had somehow yet screwed up the compression test.

3. After finishing the oil change and installing the new set of plugs, I cranked it without fuel or spark for a while, just to prime the new oil filter like usual. And I could hear it: Compression was definitely all over the place. Clear as day.

Old plugs and compression numbers... that's right, only 50 psi on cylinder 2!

Yet... then I fired it up, and it seemed to run fine. Not any smoother, as I had hoped might occur after the tune-up. But not any worse than it had run in the months prior to this fiasco.

So naturally, I set out on a 6500-mile road trip, hoping for the best.

And the best is what I got.

The truck ran great, with no perceivable reduction in power or fuel efficiency. I can't actually measure engine output, but it didn't seem any weaker. I do thoroughly track my gas mileage, which varies wildly with conditions, but nothing seemed off there either. I towed a trailer across three time zones. No oil consumption. No coolant loss, nor any bubbles or swooshing noises ever since. 6500 miles of problem-free driving, as if nothing bad ever happened.*

The pre-trip oil analysis just came back clean, too. Normal wear, no coolant, no fuel.

So... is my engine on its last legs, or was this all just a bad dream?

Last legs

*Except for that my truck smells like a putrid swamp, because I drove it through a putrid swamp on the way home from the Alvord Desert, and even though I've hosed it down and taken it to a half dozen car washes since, then later swished it around in Mississippi river floodwaters hoping to rinse off the stench... it still smells like a putrid swamp, plus now also Mississippi river floodwaters.

mk5 · Aug 15, 2024

turbodb said: ↑

I will eventually get around to posting the story, so you'll see this again (maybe, if you can wade through all the boring text), but figured this was too much up your alley to not show you now. There are at least three or four of these double crossings in a 30 mile stretch. Some of them, the highway is above the train; others, it's below.

Click to expand...

Dang, that was a cool spot!

mk5 · Aug 21, 2024

mk5[OP] said: ↑

Hey guys, I fell asleep last night making this post, but here's the update:

Okay, today's hike went wildly better... cruised thru Arches at sunset, plenty of cliché sunset photos of distant rock arches might eventually get posted... I was too lazy and sore to hike more than a few feet for any shot! Once the sun set, though, I was looking for an astro shot of a rock arch as well. However, not only is Arches is a guaranteed shit-show at night, but they also prohibit any illumination ("light painting") which is kind of my thing. Arches is out. I cruised into Moab to ponder my options, searched the internet for rock arches on blm land, estimated view angles for getting a nice galaxy shot. The obvious winner is the one I've already visited... doh! Oh well, at least I'd know the trail... and its not bad at all: mile and a half each way, some steep sections, a ladder and a cable section, but a cakewalk compared to last night's death march.

A glorious shit-show

Soon I'm almost there, and damn I'm amazed that my feet and legs somehow still work. (My feet are half covered in moleksin at this point!) Pause at the less-impressive arch on the way... am I losing my mind? I keep hearing distant voices. I shout hello a few times, not super loud, but louder than the tone of voices I'm hearing. Then... silence again.

Pretty sure someone's doing photography there at the main arch, there. And there were a couple other cars in the lot, but I thought they might have been illegally parked van-lifers. Anyway, I turn my headlamp to super-low to be polite, and stumble forth. Super difficult to walk the uneven terrain without depth perception, but soon I see I'm a few feet from a camera on a tripod--looks like someone's doing a time-lapse. Shit, I just photobombed it with my headlamp, at least it was super dim. And hey, at least I'm not crazy: I'm not alone up here, and I did hear voices. They just won't answer! I turn off my light entirely and tiptoe around this mystery camera, near the the edge of a ledge. Finally I'm stumbling thru the main arch, and I see a couple lights back there facing towards me. And sure enough somebody is stumbling towards me in the dark.

Hello

Hello?

HELLO?

Finally a reply. I apologize for bombing his time-lapse. He seems confused... says he's just grabbing his camera bag. Cool, I'm here for photography too, I say... and it looks like I have a good shot from here. He continues walking, so I set up my tripod there and start checking the focus.

From behind me:

What are you doing? Are you shooting from THERE? You can't shoot there, you're in EVERYBODY'S frame!!!

And that's when I figured out I had crashed a photography workshop.

I emerged from the middle of the arch, and couldn't see any of these people. Just the two fill lights.

They weren't being rude, to be clear. They thought I was part of the group, who should know better. None of them expected a random person to show up, and with so many people scattered about, all focused on their cameras and talking to one another... nobody felt compelled to answer a conversation-level "hello."

There's more to the story but this was the interesting part. I headed out after a few minutes, content I'd taken a good picture of nicely illuminated arch, so I could find somewhere else to try some of my own shenanigans.

And that brings me to now, parked on some bumpy road not far from I-70 so I can "camp." Started getting really tired there, couldn't make the next rest stop.

But with stars still up, I had to take "just one" really quick shot of "camp". Throw a LED in the fire ring for ambience:

Okay, nice, ready for bed. Oh wait... what's that bright stuff near the center?

Shooting stars? No.. I hadn't seen anything that bright. I just missed one overhead with the shutter, but no way I could have missed seeing these two bright streaks right in front of me during the shot.

I look back there for more. And realize I am seeing slowly moving lights there on the horizon. Sometimes alone, sometimes as groups moving together. The motion is unlike anything I've ever seen. Hovering, darting, changing brightness in unison.

Not sure what is going on. At least 3 hours to dawn, these are not LEO satellites, or any orbiting body, their velocity varies wildly. I don't think they could be aircraft either.

I shot dozens more of them with the fisheye, then broke out a fast 55mm and got the intervalometer going. Perhaps someday I'll post a gif to show the bizarre rate of these flying objects, which I cannot identify.

Aircraft on left, UFOs elsewhere. This is a 30 sec shot. Those are NOT shooting stars. Each one lasts for about a minute, and moves with wildly varying speed and brightness.

Fuck dude.

Stayed up wayyyyy too late watching this.

???
Click to expand...

DVexile said: ↑

Best guess is MEO satellites. They will be illuminated many hours away from dawn.

In your sample photo you can see three near the horizon with identical path lengths. Right above them are two with identical path lengths and apparently closely correlated flaring profiles. Unlike LEO the orbit altitudes and periods for MEO vary widely - hence the different rates you observe. It is also possible I suppose that you could catch a HEO, but I'm not sure off the top of my head what their altitude would be at Utah latitude.

None of the paths show any signs of acceleration or drag, so I'm guessing none of them are aerial flares or anything like that in the atmosphere.

Astrophotography folks complain about MEOs a lot these days - screw up photos (or sub frames) even far away from astronomical twilight.

Link to a post showing MEO streaks brighter than Saturn here:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66344788

I wonder if you happened to be oriented such that the direction you are looking here is in the direction of sunrise and so MEOs are visible there and also at a good glancing angle for bright reflections and flares?
Click to expand...

turbodb said: ↑

Wow, I was wondering what those were too! On 9/7, I snapped this photo, and was like, what are those planes all flying to the same point above the tree (on the left)? Thanks Ken, for solving the mystery.

Click to expand...

Okay... just to put this to bed... The fascinating light show I saw in the eastern sky was due to satellite flares. Specifically, Starlink flares.

They are typically viewed in a narrow range of the low eastern skies a few hours before dawn, and can reach -5 to -6 in magnitude, making them brighter than even Venus.

And something about that location, makes them really hard for our mind to process. We see dancing shapes, fighter jets and missiles whizzing around, whatever. Maybe it's the same part of our perception that makes the moon seem 5x bigger on the horizon than overhead.

Satellite flares aren't new, I remember seeking out occasional Iridium flares back in the day. But starlink flares are new, and are really hard to identify as satellites. Even for people that should know better... like, for example, airline pilots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jreMROj0Rwk

Here's an article from a similar time and place that I noted them last year:

https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/25/stra...d-by-pilots-around-eastern-colorado-thursday/

And if you don't believe me yet... this article really nails it:

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/starlink-flares-can-fool-anyone-even-airline-pilots/

I guess I'll take some solace in the fact that lots of other people are seeing UFOs instead of satellites, too.

DVexile · Aug 22, 2024

The Sky & Telescope article is very good, but for the technically inclined the arXiv study linked within the article is even better:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13091

I hadn’t really thought through what SpaceX’s mitigation was before, but reading the paper it is a kind of a “duh, of course” thing. Astronomers typically view as close to the zenith as possible so enhancing specular reflection and reducing scatter is a good way to attack the problem of interfering with astronomical observations.

But then, of course, if the geometry is different you get these quite powerful flares! I’ll have to watch for these in the future.

mk5 · Aug 22, 2024

Thanks, I meant to link that paper too. But damn, those photos were just so compelling, I forgot!

(I bet I've crossed paths with that photographer at some point... based on checking out his gallery. I mean, holy crap, we both apparently went to Puerto Rico and took nearly identical pictures of a building!)

No doubt I'll someday attempt my own 'earth shadow' composite, too... the sincerest form of flattery.

Another thing I forgot to mention above is that human vision naturally perceives false motion when looking at small distant lights at night -- autokinesis -- which I believe is the underlying reason why so many people (myself included) vividly perceive non-Keplerian motion from the flares, leading us to proclaim on internet forums that "tHeY CaN't bE SaTeLlItEs!!!1!"

The funny thing, I haven't seen any bright flares since that one night last year. Despite spending a good dozen or two nights since, stumbling around in darkness with a tripod, often 'till dawn. But then again I've only ever seen one starlink train, so maybe I'm just not very observant? (Shit, I didn't even realize I was seeing an aurora the other weekend, until the next day!)

I think I miss the flares because I mostly tend to fixate on foreground subjects when choosing where to shoot, rather than having a full view of the sky, so it's pretty rare to have the low eastern horizon in view. And at dusk, I'm usually busy cooking or at least just getting drunk, so I've never seen flares to the west either. I'll be on the ocean in a few weeks though, so if I'm sober enough, I'll try looking for them after sunset!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGx_whVC39E
Spot the Satellites!

Oh, and speaking of astrophotography: Let me promote the upcoming Great Basin NP Astronomy Festival, Sept 5-7. There will be tons of telescopes, free photography workshops, and science talks at the local drinking establishments!

From the Bryce Canyon Astronomy Festival earlier this year... nice views to the east no doubt, but the event schedule consistently left me too tired to catch any pre-dawn satellite flares

DVexile · Aug 22, 2024

If you want to see a lot of satellites in a dark sky get these:

https://skyroveroptics.com/products/sky-rover-2x54-constellation-binoculars-also-uhc-filters

They go on sale pretty frequently for around $125, or you can usually find them on AliExpress for about that much all the time. They are 2x Galilean binoculars and have an insanely wide field of view as a result (there is no field stop). It is just sort of like having bionic vision.

Now 2x doesn't sound like much, but that will improve the limiting magnitude of your vision by about 1.5 magnitude. So a good dark adapted eye in a dark sky with a naked eye limiting magnitude of 6.5 is going to be 8.0 using these. Importantly you will still have a fairly wide field of view and can scan large areas of the sky quickly.

That 1.5 improvement really changes how many satellites are visible.

Here is the naked eye view (limiting magintude 6.5):

And here is the view with the 2x binoculars (limiting magnitude 8.0):

They are also just loads of fun for scanning a dark sky. There exists a competing product with a slighter higher magnification and smaller aperture. Don't get those, they really aren't as nice as these 2x54's. Note these focus and so if you normally use glasses but your prescription isn't too many diopters and you don't have astigmatism these should work well with your glasses off (basically if you can normally use binoculars without your glasses the same should work here).

And yes, I'm once again encouraging you to hemorrhage money.

mk5 · Aug 23, 2024

Dammit Ken!

Can't wait to try them out. Have you noticed any improvement to color perception using them?

The galaxy is always just a gray blob to my eyes; although I rarely achieve fully dark-adapted vision at night, my understanding is that color vision doesn't benefit much from adaption. Perhaps doubling the angular spread of the skies is what my eyes need to give me hints of natural color.

This led me to finally look into the question... hey, what color is the night sky? Compressing the dynamic range of my night exposures into 8-bit RGB values affords me truly reckless opportunities to impart bizarre and unrealistic hues to the skies, which I don't necessarily intend, but ultimately embrace as the result of an artistic rather than photometric pursuit. I'm sure purist astrophotographers would find this tasteless, but then again, those types probably don't spend hours imparting bizarre and unrealistic hues to largely manmade foreground scenery with little LED lights either.

This line of pondering brought me to the writings of Roger Clark. I wasn't aware of his work until today, but my conclusion is that his contributions to science and photography have been rigorous and prolific. Interestingly, as it pertains to the initial topic, it turns out that much of the Milky Way should be bright enough for mesopic vision, so maybe I would see its color if I simply tried harder.

The night sky -- at least beyond our atmosphere -- is mostly brownish, like from red to yellow, but mostly brown. Definitely not the sunset-purple, Lisa Frank bullshit I seem to favor.

But it gets worse... not only am I doing a terrible job of processing my photos, I might also be ruining the landscape for others with artificial lighting. (If this has actually happened, probably not so much because I set up little LEDs in crumbling mines, but because of my camping in general -- I am fond of the glow of campfire late into the night, and I proudly fly the well-lit stars and stripes as God intended!) And hey, despite my heavy-handed if not 'unethical' approach to photo processing... at least I didn't publish overtly fake composite images in National Geographic, then blame an intern when I got caught!

I guess it comes down to taste and intent, then, as to what you think makes a good photo. Some folks have a rigorously photometric approach to natural landscapes, which apparently requires a great deal of effort to capture, calibrate, process, and stitch together. I find this fascinating to read about, but it's not what draws me to night photography.

I did get a key takeaway from this reading, though... don't be an ass-hole! Screw everyone who is light painting in Arches. I might be a self-indulgent idiot, but at least I'm housebroken, which is why last time I was at Arches, I promptly left at sunset to take my shitty light painting somewhere where it's not illegal. Which turned out, led me to stumble directly into the frame of a well-attended light-painting astrophotography workshop. So I guess I was an ass-hole after all... doh! In any case, perhaps I will be more conscientious about my use of lights at camp in the future, at least on good dark-sky nights.

(And for the record, the red lights shown at Bryce above were set out per NPS instructions... to keep people from stumbling into the canyon in the darkness!)

For the sake of this previously unknown-to-me topic of 'ethics' in night photography, though, let me post a disclaimer: All my photos are manipulated for aesthetic effect, including range compression, acutance filtering at varying scale, and arbitrary selection of color balance and tint. I sometimes employ healing and clone-stamping to remove things I don't like, such as plane trails, or to fill in missing pincushion edges if reframing.

Well, except for this one, from Mauna Kea last year:

Camera jpeg, handheld

essjay · Aug 23, 2024

Me, looking at that Mauna Kea photo after the disaster that was attempting to take engagement photos in 50mph winds after doing a surprise proposal at the summit: "Goddamnit."

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mk5 adventures

#241
turbodb AdventureTaco

#242
DVexile Exiled to the East

#243
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#244
Just_A_Guy Rain is a good thing

#245
Cwopinger Random guy who shows up in your threads

#246
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#247
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#248
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#249
Stuck Sucks Aerodynamic styling with functional design

#250
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#251
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#252
turbodb AdventureTaco

#253
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#254
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#255
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#256
DVexile Exiled to the East

#257
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#258
DVexile Exiled to the East

#259
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#260
essjay Part-Time Lurker

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mk5 adventures

#241 turbodb AdventureTaco

#242 DVexile Exiled to the East

#243 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#244 Just_A_Guy Rain is a good thing

#245 Cwopinger Random guy who shows up in your threads

#246 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#247 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#248 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#249 Stuck Sucks Aerodynamic styling with functional design

#250 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#251 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#252 turbodb AdventureTaco

#253 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#254 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#255 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#256 DVexile Exiled to the East

#257 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#258 DVexile Exiled to the East

#259 mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#260 essjay Part-Time Lurker

Products Discussed in Entire Site Forum: 2nd Gen. Builds (2005-2015) Thread: mk5 adventures

#241
turbodb AdventureTaco

#242
DVexile Exiled to the East

#243
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#244
Just_A_Guy Rain is a good thing

#245
Cwopinger Random guy who shows up in your threads

#246
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#247
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#248
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#249
Stuck Sucks Aerodynamic styling with functional design

#250
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#251
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#252
turbodb AdventureTaco

#253
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#254
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#255
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#256
DVexile Exiled to the East

#257
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#258
DVexile Exiled to the East

#259
mk5 [OP] Asshat who reads books

#260
essjay Part-Time Lurker

Products Discussed in