mk5 adventures

I guess I haven't posted much recent photography on this thread... always holding out hope that I'll have time to compose proper narratives to accompany each adventure. In the absence of that, though... and admitting that much has been posted elsewhere... to the vast readership of this thread, I present:

Some highlights from the past few months...




























































And finally, it's time to announce the winners of the first two rounds of "guess where this is" game ...

 

Announcing the winner of the first round of "guess where this is!"

Note: Due to overwhelming response and limited prizes, I've selected the winner at random, from the pool of correct answers. If you didn't win this time... thanks for playing, and good luck next time!

Photographic clue:

Answer: A 'corona calibration cross' south of Phoenix.

More specifically, near Casa Grande... hundreds of concrete '+' marks are built into the ground, each identical and some 60 feet across, laid out precisely on a grid of one-mile spacing. I learned of their existence through online travel blogs or perhaps even clickbait, many years ago, during an era when when their purpose remained shrouded in mystery (at least in the context of whatever I could find online back then).



The prevailing theory at the time was that they were part of the top-secret Corona spy satellite program, which began in the 1960s during the peak of the Cold War. How cool is that?

So that is why I'm calling them 'corona calibration sites' or 'corona crosses.' Which, according to Google Maps, aligns with accepted contemporary terminology.


In a feat of irony, I couldn't find my drone for this trip, so I don't have an areal photograph of this areal photography calibration site. Here's the next-best thing: a screen-grab stolen from Google Maps.

Now for some background: Early in the Cold War, to keep an eye on communist warmongering, the CIA developed an utterly insane spy-plane that could fly so inconceivably high that nobody could even detect it, much less threaten its flight -- especially the Soviets -- this thing could fly five miles higher than their frontline interceptors. Yet soon after their development, the communists built machines that could detect them, and they would eventually construct missiles capable of shooting them down.

In response, the CIA developed an invincible titanium superplane that could fly three miles yet higher, and over four times faster -- profoundly higher and faster than any other useful aircraft that would ever be built. Plus, they designed and built it in less time than it typically takes me to replace a pair of worn-out shoes.


Maybe if millennials could fly at mach 3.3... they could finally outrun all that student loan debt?

The communists tried for years and years, but they simply couldn't shoot these planes down. However, when the general public became aware of them, realizing instantly that these were, by vast margin, the most marvelous aircraft that humanity had or would ever again construct, everyone agreed that the fleet should be retired and placed in museums, so that future generations of unemployed social-media addicts might briefly glance up from their cellphone screens to catch glimpse of what actual innovation looks like. So once again, the CIA was forced to develop a totally new, even-crazier thing to spend money on.

By then, the cold war had reached its peak, so it was feared that yet another aircraft program simply couldn't cost enough to prevent the CIA from literally drowning in taxpayer funding. So instead, they decided to launch their latest spy cameras into space -- the Corona program. These space cameras would fly even higher and faster than the prior spy planes, but instead of being piloted by steely-eyed missile men, who could calmly chime in on air traffic control radio to remind all pilots for the rest of eternity of just how ridiculously awesome their invincible titanium spy planes were... unfortunately these new space cameras would be unmanned. This made them boring and stupid. Plus, they couldn't even use digital cameras or email, because nobody had invented those yet. Instead, they launched old-fashioned film cameras into space. When each space camera ran out of film, it would poop out a little film canister to fall back to earth, where it landed in a Walgreens parking lot and someone would eventually drop it off at the photo counter to be developed. It was a crazy idea but it eventually kind of worked.


I haven't yet managed to photograph a corona satellite in orbit... but conveniently, instead of inventing better airplanes or owning houses, millennials invented "generative AI" -- which I've employed here to illustrate how the Corona satellite worked. "AI" will soon make it unnecessary to photograph or invent anything ever again!


What does any of this have to do with these concrete crosses in the Arizona desert? Factually, nothing!

But for a long time, people had speculated that the crosses were built to help calibrate the Corona-program space cameras, which is why we call them Corona calibration crosses or whatever. Perhaps this began with reasonable conjecture, as the Corona program remained shrouded in mystery for many years. Yet before their actual purpose became widely known online, media corporations had repurposed the internet to foster the rampant and unchecked proliferation of misinformation, which turned out to be far more profitable than disseminating factual information.

Here is another link to that above article, in case you skipped it!


Fuck, I need new shoes!

The Wikipedia article has somewhat recently been updated with a more appropriate name for the site... the Casa Grande Photogrammetric Test Range.

I dunno... that doesn't sound as cool to me.


The return leg of an utterly insane dash to catch the solar eclipse at the Mexican border finally provided me a chance to not only see one of these 'mysterious' relics in person, but to make camp right on top of one, and in the good company of a work colleague. What better time to arrive at some random place in the middle of nowhere than 3AM?


The winner for this one is: Nobody!

Congratulations!

 

No, but I really haven't been paying attention to that either.

Keep in mind, all stars are blackbodies and our vision's white balance is extremely effective on blackbodies. So you are only going to notice "color" in the comparative sense of one star compared to another or something that is an outlier in a field of stars. Then they have to be bright enough for cones to be involved. The classic visual case being Sirius (A type) and Betelgeuse (M type) being near enough to be in the same naked eye field of view with dramatically different blackbody temperatures while being extremely bright. So we can easily see Betelgeuse as "red" compared to Sirius being "blue" with the naked eye. And since they are extremely bright as well as at the extreme ends of spectral types compared to the rest of the dimmer stars in the field their colors stand out.

In theory the 2x binos should help a bit of course, but for stars they aren't going to help nearly as much as regular binoculars or a telescope would. If you can't see color through 10x50s then these certainly aren't going to help as their effective entrance pupil is going to be somewhere between 12 and 14 mm depending on your eye while the 10x50s are of course going to be 50 mm. For a point source like a star that means it will be 16 times brighter in the 10x50 than through the 2x binoculars.

Double stars in a telescope are where people more typically see colors. The double stars are typically extremely close in the telescopic field and even a four inch telescope is giving you an entrance pupil of 100 mm compared to 6 to 7 mm for the naked eye. That's a significant increase in brightness. There are a handful of doubles known for their contrasting color in small telescopes.

 

Yeah, that sums up my perception of the night sky's color -- at least to the naked eye. Hues are at best locally differentiable between adjacent stars, but not meaningfully perceivable at large scale.


Once, way back in the 90s, I gazed upon the night skies with eyes that had been artificially dilated, kind of like what happens after an eye exam, but in this case, for an entirely different reason. Thus my eyes admitted more light through their pupils than would be possible with normal dark-adapted vision. Of course I don't know the degree to which my pupils were dilated, but a reasonable upper bound might be by a factor of two, admitting four times more light -- thus quite similar to the enhancement one could expect from the use of 2x binoculars, save for the efficiency of their optics and the relentless decay of visual acuity with age.

My recollection is that the stars and galaxies abruptly took on unworldly hues... defying the gamut of human visual perception to such spectacular degree that I could even taste each photon as its energy merged with that of my spirit. Fourteen billion years unfolded before me in slow motion, over and over again, until I had traced the unique trajectory of each and every atom comprising my body.

Most impressively, this all unfolded in the late afternoon, during high-school gym class.

I suspect that the dilation of my pupils alone was not solely responsible for this sudden onset of omnipresent hyperspiritual color perception. More likely, both conditions were the result of a single prior decision that, in hindsight, had been executed about half an hour too soon. In a chemistry class, during which I had coincidentally estimated that my body comprised the better part of 10^28 atoms. I forget what the actual count turned out to be, but I was reasonably close.

Nonetheless I hope that the doubling of effective pupil diameter afforded by these low-cost 2x binoculars, presently en route from China, might yet afford me somewhat enhanced perceptive abilities when employed to gaze upon the heavens. In particular because I've since forgotten what photons taste like. Also, there has been a high turnover and an alarming overall increase in atoms comprising my body, so I am curious about both the cosmic origins of the new ones, as well as why the old ones no longer work as well.

 

Incidentally, I just managed to photograph a Corona satellite, for the benefit of the above discussion:


Thanks for nothing, AI!

This is where the film canister would have been located, before it was pooped out to fall back to earth. Closer examination shows that there are spring-loaded studs, perhaps to assist with reliable expulsion of the exposed media. I was unable to reach them to see if they made funny spring noises.

Those with greater knowledge of the Corona program will perhaps note that this is not actually a Corona spacecraft, but rather one of the later busses fielded during the final phase of the film-return era. Whatever.



Here is a side-view. Please forgive the crude defish warp--this is what happens when you are too lazy to change lenses. To the right we see another film canister poking out, ready to be pooped down to earth. Nearby, we see an assembly of two balls suspended beneath an articulating shaft. Important spy-satellite stuff, I guess?



To get the spy cameras into space, they would tape them atop one of these tall vertical cylinders that were filled with explosives. Some guy would count down from 10 on a loudspeaker, after which the explosives would blow up in a specific way that delivered the cameras to orbit.


So many to choose from...

When the space cameras were designed, it was assumed that their film canisters would land in Walgreens parking lots, so that someone would develop the film. This worked well near cities, but not over oceans. To keep the film canisters from falling into the ocean, they planned to catch them with box cars:



Unfortunately, the box cars immediately sank into the ocean, so they quickly built a new type of box car, adding wings so that they could fly. This gave us the C-119J 'flying boxcar':


So much room for satellite poop!

This was actually not the first flying box car our nation built, nor the best known.



This flying box car is very famous, and not just because they somehow managed to misspell 'box car' when they were painting the plane.



Standing in front of this glistening behemoth, one cannot help but to lament the unprecedented death and destruction it brought upon humanity. Yet, while it can't be known with certainty, the probable truth is that I would not exist had this plane not accomplished its mission. Pondering this, the grandson of an infantryman and a combat engineer, some 80 years after both had been tasked to fontline duties in the pacific war, suddenly found himself struggling to hold back tears at an airplane museum. Pathetic!


Not to scale

Let's check out some other stuff...


Here's part of a plane they nuked on purpose, some decades later in Nevada... confirming earlier fears that nuclear explosions were bad for airplanes.

Perhaps we can find something more up-beat. Decades and trillions spent sustaining the world's premiere military-industrial complex... is it really all just death and destruction?


The first deployed thermonuclear bomb... the size and weight of a bus! (B-36 fuselage for scale) Thanks to advances in technology, a device of the same yield now fits in a suitcase! (But it would probably still be very heavy for a suitcase...)



Well shucks... I tried. Death and destruction it is. Enjoy!


Nothing to see here!



Okay, here we have... some kind of pneumatic cheese grater?



I dunno.



Oh, there's...
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
... afterburning turbojets on a supersonic strategic nuclear bomber!!



(but only four on the bone)










This one has backwards wings lol:




This one is from the Tim Hortons menu:



Okay I guess that's all my photos, hope you had fun.

Wait here's more, you're welcome:

 

Well dang, that was cool.

 

Ah! So Dayton is where the KH-9 landed! I missed it at Udvar-Hazy back when it went on display right after declassification in 2011. It's been a good 25-30 years since I stopped by Dayton. Guess I'll have to go back one of these days.

 

Yeah, the exhibits are surprisingly up to date with contemporary events, such as their pandemic response. I only got through two of the four hangers, the rest was essentially a sprint!



They had nice display on the spy camera too, with one of the film canisters opened up... too bad factual information isn't really my thing.

Long-ass drive from Cleveland though.

 

So. Disappointed. In. You.

You do not own Highway 99 through Seattle.

 

The fuck I don't! Ain't y'all heard the song...

This land is my land
This land is my land
From the part that's my land
To the rest that's my land...
​

Learned that shit in kindergarten, yo. Mmmm... crayons!

But as you know, I've since graduated to huffing paint. Which, in combination with the fact that I lack the motivation, opportunity, technical climbing ability, equipment, and eye-hand coordination necessary to effect such vandalism, forms the basis of my defense against your baseless and defamatory accusations.

Your honor, chemical analysis has linked only one of the two types of paint used in this deplorable act of vandalism with the samples taken from my client's sinuses. As the defense has established, it is preposterous to suggest that he could have ever possessed the other type of paint without vigorously huffing it as well!
​

Also, if I was going to vandalize something, I'd try a bit harder. Maybe Pickle Rick shitting on a Cybertruck's windshield, with the uniwiper flailing it in all directions? Hard to say for sure until the fumes fill my lungs. But definitely not this.

This land, was made for me to tag!​

On a more serious note, I am immediately reminded of the 2015 duck boat crash that unfolded on this bridge. I devour NTSB reports like a kindergartner devours crayons--wait, I mean... allegedly devours crayons.

 

that's the I-5 ship canal bridge pictured

 

Yeah, you're right, it is. Funny that I misidentified it, given that I live here.

IT'S EVEN WORSE THAN I REALIZED MIKE, you're going after interstates!

And are you saying you were responsible for the Duck boat incident too?!? OMG man. Chill out.

I feel like this is all just karma. You know, because...

 

Holy shit, you're right!

TEN POINT TO GRYFFINDOR!!!

This is the exact kind of inanity I seek in life. You guys are the best!

 

You guys…lol
Still waiting for that ll bean hip belt to be in stock…

 

Wait... does that mean this wasn't even your own picture of the bridge? I mean, how else could you not know which of these adjacent nearly-identical bridges was photographed??? Did you PLAGIARIZE someone else's picture?????

Just like you PLAGIARIZED my arbitrarily chosen username from TacomaWorld, when you ILLEGALLY VANDALIZED the WRONG BRIDGE, and TRIED TO FRAME ME???!?!!!?!!?

​

I still feel legitimately bad about that one... it was just too funny not to post!

What the L.L. Bean fuck?

You and me both, man.

 

Hey now. I took that shitty picture all by myself. And I cropped it too. Twice. Once to remove the parking lot of the (not very good) restaurant we ate at, and a second time to show - in all it's glory - the MKS, and try to pass it off as MK5. But, looking closer and given your "too actively distancing yourself," I think it's probably yours, so I've edited so you don't have to worry about the MKS guy who wanders around doing this to various public structures taking credit for your work.

Do not feel bad at all. I laugh all the time at this.


.........and now I always try to take off my hood whenever someone takes my picture. (At first it was pants, but that didn't work out quite right.)

 

Two can play at this game... you double-left-handed, powerpoint-using VANDAL!



Whelp... there went my night.

Got thru some recent photos at least...












fffshSHWOOSHshshfff...fffshSHWOOSHshshfff...fffshSHWOOSHshshfff...

 

UFO Conspiracy Theories Confirmed

My ingenious plan to observe western-horizon Starlink flares on last month's sailing trip didn't pan out, as our mooring offered somewhat obscured views to the west, our vessel offered copious distractions, and the heavens above quickly became obscured by a marine layer shortly after twilight each night. Some sort of problem had scrubbed the scheduled Vandenberg launch too... plus, I didn't even bring my camera!


Cellphone shot to the north... this isn't dusk light--it's the glow of the urban cesspool I call home, some 20 miles distant. Oh, and also a kick-ass party boat anchored nearby.


New and old... visiting an even older place

However, I unknowingly captured evidence of this UFO spectacle on a 'ghost-hunting' expedition just the other night:


A place to call my own...

The flares aren't super prominent with the wide-angle lens, but look to the right edge of the roof. I count 12 flares at source resolution.

Some other guy set up and painted this next scene--I just strolled up and photographed it from an adjacent position. Thanks, random guy with a camera, and his companion, who both engaged me in conversation, welcomed my approach, and even coordinated their headlamp use to accommodate my own exposure. I hope their shot turned out even better than mine -- or that they were at least more tasteful in processing it!


I count 11 here... 30s exposure. Plus a hot-purple galaxy, as God intended!

The ghost tour was super awesome, but from an astrophotography perspective, it was a total shit show. As sunset approached, it became immediately clear that I wasn't the first person to have identified the loophole it beckoned, or to attempt exploiting it for the purpose of night photography, as I had gleefully hoped when booking our tickets several months ago. After all, my last 'ghost tour' event had been a spectacular success for my budding photography ambitions--I was literally the only person to show up with a tripod!


Six Starlink flares off the port bow of this shot, taken along the stamp mill tour -- 15s exposure.

But here, even within the tour groups, many had packed considerably more and far-better photography equipment than I was smugly toting. A substantial minority had backpacks full of camera gear, with bodies and lenses that alone cost more than my car. And I'm pretty sure non-participants infiltrated the park in even greater numbers, some even lugging carts or wagons, seeking solely to capitalize on the rare photography opportunities that the extended park hours would offer.


This guy was shooting B&W film with a pinhole camera -- at least for the golden hour -- props to him!


Enjoyed conversing with this guy when our paths crossed again later that night -- hope this photo is sufficiently anonymous, because it perfectly exemplifies the onslaught of well-equipped photographers headed into the park at dusk...

Countless others just showed up with cellphones and flashlights for what I would call 'crude' light painting. But to be clear: There is no bar to entry for this hobby, and while I was mildly disappointed by the ensuing chaos, I fault nobody for sharing this infatuation, taking advantage of the opportunity, and hopefully enjoying the results -- just as I did. This is, after all, a rigorously protected state park that normally closes at 6PM -- and it is ridiculously difficult and/or expensive to gain night access outside of these ghost tours, which occur only a few times each year.


The only thing better than the night-photography opportunities were the ghost tours themselves. The people who work and volunteer at this park are absolutely awesome!





Yet even after the tours concluded, and the non-photographer crowd had largely departed, it was virtually impossible to pull off a 30-second exposure without someone shining a weapons-grade flashlight directly into my eyes and the lens of my camera, or at least washing out a carefully framed and metered composition with 2000 lumens and 6000 kelvins of... well, whatever their own activities required. That's in addition to the frequent splash of headlights from vehicles departing, and of park staff and volunteers on patrol, as was to be expected.


Unfortunately, the town's most iconic structures face south... constructed by short-sighted morons favoring the practicality of natural lighting and winter tenability over the future desires of giddy night photographers.

It was likewise virtually impossible to pick a composition that someone else wasn't already working from a different angle, although there was no way to ascertain this through normal means of verbal communication. Apparently, once the stars come out, the ability to hear or comprehend human conversation immediately ceases. Or at least, a substantial fraction of night photographers work in pairs if not larger groups, and simply tune out all auditory information originating from anyone else, unless literally shouted three times and punctuated by profanity -- in which case the odds are at best even.

(I didn't actually get upset or swear at anyone -- the whole thing was fantastic fun for me -- but I heard plenty of distant cursing... and I can't believe how frequently my attempts to initiate conversations failed, even when repeated enthusiastically from just yards away. With few exceptions, if there were two or more people crowding a tripod, you would need a train horn to get their attention. And you might need to detach it from the train and tap their shoulder with it.)

Note: I acknowledge that some people are deaf or have hearing impairments, and I don't mean to poke fun at them. But my experience would suggest that a wildly improbable concentration of hearing-impaired people attended this event to engage in quiet conversations while examining their camera displays.


Pickings were slim for south-facing compositions free of others' illumination.

I first experienced this phenomenon when I crashed a photography workshop in Utah last year, stumbling into their composition while shouting "Hello???" into the darkness. It wasn't until I set up my tripod and opened the shutter that I got a response, because I was literally standing in the middle of like 20 people's compositions. (I couldn't see them, because it was fucking dark -- and I had entirely turned off my headlamp on approach as I had perceived their distant murmurs and reasonably concluded that someone might be doing astrophotography there.)

It was pretty similar here, except instead of just one ass-clown stumbling into a single premeditated composition in near-total darkness, it was a hundred hyperfocused enthusiasts wandering around America's best-preserved ghost town under immaculately crisp and dark autumn skies... a small yet alarming fraction of which saw fit to turn on their tactical-intensity headlamps whenever their own shutters were closed. It was a non-stop spectacle of ruined exposures, fruitless interrogatives shouted upon situationally deafened ears, and occasional explicative-laden cries of lamentation. And the whole entire time was completely awesome.



The gas station was perfectly pre-lit for dark-sky exposures. The streaks to the left are from headlights hitting suspended conductors -- not Starlink flares.

The guy to the right above was trying to photograph a truck (out of frame) as I approached. Working alone, he responded politely when I offered my greeting and requested his permission to encroach, which of course as a Free American I didn't need, but as a Participant in Human Society I was glad that he granted. I'd like to think he perhaps appreciated that I approached in total darkness, rather than shining a flashlight directly into his eyes for several minutes. I observed that he was trying to light-paint the truck with intermittent illumination, so rather than compete for lighting and shutter time, I decided instead to frame up on the building behind him and await my own turn. The whole entire time, a party across the street, photographing something else from an opposing perspective, kept flicking on their headlamps and flooding his exposures with intense backlighting at... I'd guess... 29-second intervals. This guess is based on what he eventually shouted:

For the Love of God, can you just turn off your flashlight for 30 fucking seconds???

The distant light quickly flicked off... but again, only for about twenty-nine seconds. The guy gave up in frustration and left. Now it was my turn!


Nine here by my count

I tried a few different angles at shorter shutter intervals, managing to squeeze in a few exposures between the persistent splashes of nearby headlamps. None of them turned out particularly well.



This next angle might have worked out better if I had dropped the camera by a foot or two, and perhaps set a light in the bed to throw some light into the cab. As I began fiddling with the tripod, the party from the across the street started approaching, shining an intense headlamp directly at me. I shouted out... Hey, are you wanting to shoot here? Or something like that. Nothing. Shouted it a bit louder... not in anger or anything, just wanting to coordinate things. But they just kept talking quietly and stopped perhaps 20 feet away. I was standing directly aside their now-intended subject. Right where some other guy had just cursed at them. Lit up like a jogger in the headlights of a speeding Mercedes, its driver too drunk to swerve but too rich to convict. I heard a tripod being adjusted, accompanied briefly by a reduction in the glare when the headlamp was directed towards this task. Then its focus returned directly to my eyes. I stood there for several more seconds. There was no possible way they didn't see me... right?

This is the one and only time I used my own flashlight. I had been stumbling around in darkness since the tour ended. I shined its 800 nominal lumens at my feet, illuminating myself and my tripod, positioned three feet from the truck, where I had been standing for several minutes. I felt bad for probably ruining someone else's distant exposure.

Hey, you're in my frame!

I clarified my intent to complete a 30 second exposure. They were anxious because the park would soon close. We actually had some 15-20 minutes to go, and I figured there were only a few people left at this point -- it was getting cold, and the galactic core had largely already set. But I assured them I would soon move on.

As I opened the shutter again, they shouted out, this time very loudly: Is anyone else shooting here?

I'm not kidding, I think I heard eight replies. From all directions, but none of them very far away. It was a zoo, for sure, but most folks had been silently shooting in darkness.

And then, about 29 seconds later, someone else clicked on a headlamp from a different direction, ruining my shot.


With the church now roped off, I couldn't get the right window properly backlit.

In the end, I guess this is kind of a pointless rant, which I hope doesn't undermine how thoroughly I enjoyed this event, the whole entire time. It was so much fun.

I wish more people were able to operate their cameras in total darkness, by muscle memory... were willing to dim their displays sufficiently to accommodate scotopic vision... patient enough to allow it to emerge such that terrain can be traversed with little or no additional illumination... and that when additional illumination is needed, that it might be employed with discretion, only in the direction and at the intensity required. I rarely ever achieve fully dark-adapted vision, but it takes only a couple minutes to see well enough to navigate even steep terrain by the dim light of my camera's display.

That said, I am no more worthy of enjoying this place than anyone else, and if folks need tons of light to operate their cameras or walk around safely at night, then I'm glad they're enjoying a fun hobby safely. I just wish we were all better at communicating.



And speaking of communicating... how will it be done in the future? With UFOs in outer space, obviously. Nobody is going to pay $140 a month just for dark skies.

 

Announcing the Winner for Round Two of the ‘guess where this is’ game!


Photographic clue:

====================​

If this isn't too much information, I don't know what is: When I'm super constipated, I'll proclaim that I'm 'making diamonds'.

Poop is mostly carbon, which in pure form can exist in wildly distinct solid states, or 'allotropes' for the textbook-inclined. The most common is graphite, having two-dimensional structure, whereas the rarer three-dimensional cubic structure aka diamond is considerably more valuable--not only as a gemstone of highly lucrative yet problematic global trade, but also as an industrial abrasive, as well as in certain technological applications.

Converting carbon in the form of graphite to that of diamond is possible, but requires tremendous heat and pressure--so much so that even modern machinery can't compress graphite into large high-purity monocrystalline diamond. Abrasive-grade diamond can be produced by specialized presses or chemical explosions, with pressures approaching or exceeding 100,000 atmospheres.

My digestive tract apparently achieves similar temperatures and pressures -- both processes yield a product of exceptional abrasive quality, albeit with low purity and frustratingly slow throughput.

To produce high-purity monocrystalline diamond, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is used instead. (Insert fart joke here, followed by reference to a scientific publication reporting CVD synthesis of graphene from dog poop.)

As a practical example, a CVD diamond window for a high-power microwave tube can cost upwards of $50k, but no other material offers the combination of transparency, thermal conductivity, and mechanical strength necessary to allow output power approaching the megawatt range. Diamond engagement rings can approach and exceed this price range as well, although for reason's I don't accept, ‘natural’ (i.e., mined) gemstones are favored over synthetic materials.

To offer a bit of wisdom to the yet-unwed: get engaged when you are relatively poor and thus unable to waste such extravagant sums buying small impure crystals for an application that benefits so little from their unique thermal and dielectric properties. Save that money for your next klystron build, bro!

But what if you could subject graphite to temperatures exceeding ten thousand degrees, and pressures approaching a million atmospheres... perhaps then it could be converted to highly valuable diamond material?

That question was investigated here… some 25 miles southeast of Carlsbad, NM. Not as the primary objective of the experiment of course. But one of the many topics studied here, under the guise of peace, using a weapon of war.






Answer: the Project Gnome site.


Winner: Nobody

====================​

I had lived the better half of my probable lifespan without setting foot anywhere near the numerous yet typically remote sites of the nuclear detonations that punctuated the atomic age. But within a matter of months, I found myself stumbling around the second such site, in a second and distant state, as I stepped out of the truck exhausted and sunburned some time after 3 AM. We had been delayed, not at our nation’s border but just beyond it, by a locked gate separating us from where I had parked my truck at a secure storage facility... yet the adrenaline rush of its brazen afterhours heist had long since faded. It was time to rest--the sun would soon rise, and unlike the prior day, there would be no mid-morning moonshade to provide respite from its relentless blinding heat.

Unlike the better-known nuclear test site in Nevada I described previously... this wasn't the battle-scarred landscape of a cold-war frontline. No stadium-sized radioactive craters. No massive cryostats swaying above half-mile deep test bores. Definitely no cafeteria either--but importantly: no security perimeter, nor a squadron of guards who will be commended for center-punching your skull if you sneak beyond it.

This site wasn't abruptly orphaned from its purpose by an implausible yet enduring peace, nor has it been maintained in a state of lukewarm decay awaiting the inevitable collapse of such fragile an illusion. This site lived, thrived, and died naturally. A single shot--a paltry 3.1 kilotons--in late 1961. Remediation was completed by the late 70s. All that remains visible today is the above headstone. And a few concrete slabs some distance to the southwest.

Which is really a shame... I think this ought to be a national park today--with underground tours and all!


The capped access shaft nearby

All that said, if you are going to show up in the middle of the night to camp at a nuclear test site... of the two I've yet visited, this one is probably going to be your safer bet. Sure, NTS offers far more compelling scenery and history, but their prohibition on dispersed camping is somewhat strictly enforced. Camp Gnome here falls on regular-ol' BLM land.

But don't let the lack of radioactive craters and rusting battleship guns mislead you: This forgotten footnote of Cold-War scientific ambition lies in the middle of an active battlefield – completely surrounded by the bizarre hellscape of an ongoing modern war. This war is being waged against earth's brittle crust and relentless gravity, over the lucrative hydrocarbons they hold captive, by the overwhelming industrial might of modern human existence.


Approaching the turnoff on the highway. This road isn’t wet... that’s the glorious sheen of hydrocarbons. I can still smell this picture.

We were joined by a steady stream of pickup trucks, emerging from all directions to congest the highways soon after we passed Pecos at 2AM. All of them full-size domestic long-beds, white, with those goofy-looking cellphone boosters. Must have been a shift change—it felt like rush hour. Leaving pavement, we joined an endless caravan of Halliburton tractor trailers. All white day cabs, towing flatbeds of tubes, metal rods, or heavy-looking contraptions. They drove just as fast on these terrible roads as I dared myself – I longed to pass only because of the blinding dust. We got lost several times, finding what showed as well-established thru-routes on my satellite imagery to be a rats-nest of active oilfield development, with various prior routes now blocked by crudely laid plastic pipes or wire bundles strung between new wellheads. Damn near got stuck traversing freshly-churned earth. It was truly surreal—especially at night – and the flash of distant lightning made it all the more ominous.

These are the Texas oil fields.

(Technically, we're in New Mexico, but that's only because they didn't know the extent of Texas's oil when they drew the state lines.)

====================​

People disagree about whether it is good or bad to fight this war with earth’s crust, to exploit the value of its hydrocarbon reserves to continue making our lives easier and better.

But people previously disagreed about whether it was good or bad to fight the Cold War, and to exploit the value of the nuclear technologies that gushed from its wellheads. An unprecedented duality – on one hand: the promise of free infinite energy and inconceivable economic prosperity; on the other: the guarantee of global radiological apocalypse, if not by destructive intent then certainly at least by the innate incompetence of our species.

Its upside had been largely embraced by the generation who unknowingly first enabled it as a matter of wartime necessity, who upon later learning of its potential, accepted it as the logical continuation of the unprecedented scientific innovation that had so flourished during this era of decisive and effective leadership. Yet the children born into that post-war prosperity came of age during the chaos of brinksmanship and its devolution towards the stalemate of mutually assured destruction, while also watching the inevitable yet objectively terrifying learning curve of nuclear power maturation unfold. A myopic mindset emerged, as the masses lost sight of the technological promiseland beyond the thickening haze of fear, ignorance, and self-righteousness... or perhaps were simply too high on drugs to know right from better.

Thus was born a new era of global environmentalism, united in opposition to the threats and promises of nuclear technology.

They of course failed to deter the ongoing strategic arms race—the only actual threat of significance—and to this day, thermonuclear warheads stand armed and ready, atop pre-targeted ICBMs, in various missile silos and undetectable submarines around the world, 24/7.

(Many have since been decommissioned, and some of them we can tour or rent on AirBNB! But there are plenty enough in active duty to ensure the same nuclear apocalypse our parents grew up fearing, even though we no longer seem particularly worried about it.)


A Titan ICBM museum I toured the other year... they even let you push the launch buttons for fun! I bought a circuit board in the gift shop as a souvenir... seems to be a signal filter rather than targeting computer as I had hoped.

This obstinate and growing opposition to technological innovation was ultimately victorious, however, in derailing the nascent nuclear power industry before it could save us from the perils of power “too cheap to meter,” electric cars, and receding carbon emissions by the 1990s. And as a result, now we have global warming.

A new generation of environmentalists have emerged to fight climate change as well, standing proudly on the shoulders of the prior environmentalists who caused it. I am one of them, I guess.


Driving past a nearby oil well the next morning as we sought pavement...

But I’m not the kind of environmentalist who blames our predicament on oil companies... who can blame them for continuing to extract and sell this inferior product to enable our modern existence, just because the evolution of its superior technological replacement was torpedoed decades ago by self-entitled fear-mongering idiots? Sorry folks, global warming was caused by NIMBY environmentalists, not oil companies. And they did this before we even had social media to amplify misinformation... so it’s hard to hold out much hope for the future.

====================​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdtJOn8gHMk

The Gnome shot unfolded as the first chapter of the ‘Plowshare’ campaign – which sought to develop ‘peaceful’ applications of nuclear detonations – and as far as I can tell this was perhaps the most ambitious of its undertakings. Plowshare later gave us the Sedan crater I toured last year, and was proposed to make I-40 less steep between Ludlow and Needles. But rather than simply moving earth with massive explosions, this one pondered much-deeper scientific questions... with a massive explosion of course.


I found this epic illustration on Reddit but can’t figure out where it came from. Oh well... welcome to the internet. Stolen and re-posted. I believe the artist's signature says "Ray Proch?"

This took place in the heyday of nuclear reactor development, but there was and remains an inescapable limitation facing all types of reactors: The reaction has to occur pretty slowly, or else the reactor will melt or explode. It took months for even gigawatt-class production reactors to transmute viable yields for weapons programs ... and power reactors routinely operate for years between refuelings. Was there a faster or cheaper way to produce valuable new isotopes from nuclear reactions, other than running slow, expensive nuclear reactors for months or years?

(As a modern example: Having shuttered the vast majority of our research and production reactors, repeatedly cancelled plans to replace them, and woefully underfunded nuclear research and education for several decades, the US has run out of Pu-238 once used to power ambitious deep-space exploration missions such as Voyager and recent Mars rovers. Our two best remaining research reactors have now been tasked with producing it, in hopes of producing 1.5 kg per year by 2026. But for reference, the latest Mars rover alone needed like 5 kg!)

Back then, spending on weapons development had utterly dwarfed that invested in other reactor programs; in fact the vast majority of the world’s reactor fleet at the time had been built solely to produce weapons materials. But nuclear explosives were essentially reactors themselves -- they just completed their reactions within perhaps a few microseconds. I’m not sure of the exact time scale, but in any case, it was dramatically faster than the months or years needed for nuclear reactors to fission the same amount of material. Think of all the savings in labor alone, if a bomb could do in a flash what a reactor could do in a year! I imagine Project Gnome began with a conversation like this:

“Shit...” some guy said impatiently, when he was told it would take four years to produce usable quantities whatever ridiculous isotope he wanted for his harebrained idea, “couldn’t we just pile our target material next to an atomic bomb and blow it up instead? I need this shit in eight months!”

“Ummm... sure, why not?” said the Federal Government. “Here is a free atomic bomb!”

“Not so fast,” chimed in a scientist. He took a drag from his cigarette as he walked over to the glistening bomb, pointing at it, “I’ve seen one of these babies blow up next to a battleship. The entire US Navy scoured the oceans for years, but we never found more than four ounces of that battleship!”

“Fuck!” said the first guy. “I need like seven pounds!”

“Don’t worry,” said the scientist, “you can just bury it underground first. Send your team in a few days later, they can dig up all the good stuff after it cools down.”

“Wait, it’s going to be hot?” asked the AEC, who had been browsing their phones for a while, but suddenly became interested in the conversation.

“Hot enough to turn dog shit into diamonds!” exclaimed the scientist.

“Our guys are saying they need heat to make electricity... and, uh... we’re supposed to make electricity or something, right?” the AEC asked, glancing back at the Federal Government.

“Jesus Christ, we told you to make electricity like 15 years ago,” sighed the Federal Government.

“So... can we, like, have the heat?”

Everyone looked back to the first guy, who said, “fucked if I care--take all the heat you want!”

“Okay, sounds like we have a plan...” said the Federal Government. “Here is a map of America, you can blow up wherever you want. Now, let’s circle back to making diamon--”

“Do it here!” exclaimed Texas, with a rough voice and deep drawl, pointing its cigar vaguely at the map.

“You mean New Mexico?”

“That’s occupied west Texas, son.” ​

The site was chosen for its unique geology – at least compared to that of southwest Nevada where many prior subterranean detonations had already taken place. In particular, the salt-bed topology would offer favorable conditions not only to contain the explosion, but also to retain its thermal energy in the form of molten salt, which at the time seemed potentially viable as a future means of energy production, by harnessing that heat to generate steam and turn turbines. This was of course completely ridiculous, even if nuclear bombs were free, which they weren’t. But it was a different time back then, especially in terms of accounting, so it was actually somewhat normal to consider atomic bombs as ‘free’ byproducts of our nation’s self-preservation efforts amidst the ongoing cold war. On a positive note, our nation successfully preserved itself. Nothing about it was free, though, and we still are a long way from actually paying it off, even today.


They literally built a plant to recover the thermal energy atop ground zero. Then disassembled it for the blast, planning to scurry back after the earth had settled and reconstruct it. (Frame grab from above-linked AEC video.)

A salt bed, specifically the Salado salt media in which the explosion would occur, would also offer dramatically different geological properties than the porous Oak Springs tuff in Nevada, in which prior underground testing had occurred... over 2x faster wave velocity, with over 10x less porosity and moisture content. Monitoring this explosion would help geologists figure out how to better detect underground nuclear detonations occurring elsewhere in the world in other types of rock, to distinguish their signatures from the frequent sounds of earthquakes and imploding Soviet submarines. Furthermore, as radioisotope byproducts of the underground fission reactions would become entrapped in the molten rock surrounding the explosion, doing this in salt would allow those valuable isotopes to be extracted by pumping water through the cavity, and recovering them from the brine.


Emplacing instrumentation in angled bores off the main drift. They planned everything incredibly carefully. From [2].

Ultimately, the region’s geology did eventually prove favorable for energy production -- but only in the form of oil extraction -- not molten radioactive salt as envisioned 60 years ago. One cannot visit the site in silence today, due to the non-stop clamor of active oil-well drilling nearby.


The clamor of well-drilling had only intensified when we eventually awoke late the next morning and found this sign nearby... no, they aren't literally drilling into the test site, but damned if they aren't getting close these days.

But long before the oil wells had encroached, this was a site of intense development and scientific interest. In fact, it is hard to believe what unfolded here, based on what little remains today.


Thousands of people worked here. “SGZ” means surface ground zero – where the monument stands today. I found this aerial photo online and believe it to be in the public domain, although the annotations may have been added by whoever uploaded it to wherever I stole it from.

Somewhat unique for the era, Project Gnome was widely publicized, rather than shrouded in absolute secrecy. Heck, press tours were granted for its underground excavations prior to the detonation.


This photo appeared in LIFE magazine, credited to J R Eyerman (1961). It shows the neutron tube emerging at the buttonhook.

A massive shaft was sunk some 1200 feet deep, into the salt bed, from which a drift was excavated to the detonation site some 1100 feet to the northeast.


From [3]

As it approached the detonation site, the drift took a circuitous route, described in the literature as a ‘buttonhook’ profile. It was believed that this would be self-sealing, as the blast would basically pinch the curved part of the drift shut in an instant. And it did... but it appears they miscalculated its geometry, because the blast also tore its way through to the straight portion of the drift, launching superheated radioactive gas and supersonic chunks of rock all the way down the hallway, crashing against the gigantic concrete plug near the shaft, and the shot unexpectedly vented within minutes of detonation. Radiation levels hit 1.4 R/h along highway 128 later that night. I'm sure they had planned for this contingency, but it was probably considered a massive fuck-up.


From [3]

In fact, it seems that the whole experiment, despite its intricate planning, unfolded as a gigantic shit show. I mean... what else did anyone expect?

From what I can tell, they faced hours of weather delays, then when they finally pressed the button, the ton of TNT they had piled nearby and intended to blow up later, for the purpose of calibrating the shockwave instruments to a known stimulus... instead exploded randomly, either convoluting the shot data, or at least going unrecorded.

Then, the unexpected venting of radioactive steam not only depressurized the cavity and released much heat, but also prevented them from doing most of the planned follow-up studies for several days.

The cavity, initially containing some 2400 tons of molten salt, was immediately quenched when an additional 28,000 tons of rock collapsed into it from above, believed largely due to the arrival of the rarefaction wave reflected from the surface above (labeled #7 below). It was speculated that conducting a similar blast in a compacted salt dome rather than this Solado salt bed might have allowed a cavity pool to form without subsequent ceiling collapse, but here, the ceiling collapsed, so they never got to try out the little power plant they had built. Nor was another blast ever conducted for this purpose.


From [3]

The explosion further severed a vast number of the instrumentation cables they had run into the ground to monitor the blast (apparently, totaling 100 miles and 12 tons of cable), many of which had already suffered from corrosion due to being buried in wet salt for weeks, causing many signals to be lost or drowned out by electromagnetic/electrochemical noise at the moment of detonation. [2] And between the unanticipated surface radiation and the fact that, well, everything had been blown to shit--they had great trouble redrilling into the cavity to even measure its temperature profile much less extract steam, with many of the probes getting stuck or damaged. [4]



The man-made cavern 1200 feet below where I had camped, when it was reentered in 1962. AEC/LRL photo, taken from Wikipedia -- but I tastelessly manipulated it to false-color the guy's pants, shirt, and hat, so you can more easily see him here. I felt the red shirt was appropriate...

I don’t mean to suggest that the whole thing was a failure. A great deal was learned. And as a 21st century scientist, I long for the era when such wildly ambitious projects were even imaginable. I think that’s why I’ve so greatly enjoyed reading about it.

To close out our discussion of the technical results, we can consider what might have occurred, if I had been sleeping at this spot in my little pickup truck around noon on the 10th of December 1961, instead of a late-spring night in 2024.


From [2]

At t=0, I would have been blissfully unaware as a 3.1 kT nuclear explosion unfolded about a quarter mile beneath me--although if I wasn’t too soundly asleep, perhaps I would have noticed the firing of flash bulbs which were used to synchronize the high-speed cameras monitoring the site. (I’m not sure why I hadn’t noticed all that instrumentation around me when arrived or as I slept in all morning--maybe I was really tired?) But even if fully awake and alert, it would have taken my brain about 200 ms to even process this visual stimulus, which is also how long it took the pressure wave from below to reach the surface – and this would suddenly produce a much more problematic and alarming cacophony of stimuli for my brain and the rest of my body to process.

The ground was instantly thrust upwards with a peak acceleration of around 25 Gs. Everything including the ground itself flew skyward at an initial speed of 12 miles an hour, reaching a height of 6 feet during a weightless freefall lasting an entire second. My truck might have been thrown just a bit higher, what with the energy stored in its springs and tires, which would have easily been overloaded by this initial shockwave from the ground. But that impulse was only on par with landing a 6-foot freefall, which while significantly higher than I’ve ever accidentally jumped the truck while driving recklessly, probably wouldn’t be entirely catastrophic. I might expect damage to suspension components, and deformation of whatever load-bearing frame elements limit compressive suspension travel, but the tires would likely have survived intact, and the truck would probably still start and drive.


From the AEC film linked above

In the cab, I would have been thrown from my seat, but not so violently as to strike the roof. I would be instantly deafened by the blast, and there’s a good chance I’d soon be tasting blood as my drooling mouth slammed shut against my cheek or tongue. The truck would land a second later, slamming into the now-rebounding ground with similar violence, but nearly four feet higher than I had initially been parked. A milder yet pronounced shock would arrive half a second later, and when the shaking finally ended, the ground would still be about 3 feet higher than it had been before.

I would probably soon exit the truck and stumble around in a daze, coughing and squinting in the cloud of dust that had been kicked into the air. Spitting blood, with ringing ears... yet largely unharmed. Perhaps I would find my cellphone on the passenger floorboard and try dialing 911... but the call wouldn't go through--not necessarily because cell service didn't exist in 1961, but primarily just because I have AT&T, so my calls never go through.

Within a minute or two, steam would begin to erupt from a nearby drill hole, and I would probably frantically crawl back into the truck and start driving away--but not before aspirating a fatal dose of fission byproducts.

It would take another week or two for me to die of radiation poisoning, during which there would be lots of questions to answer -- such as how I had managed to drive up to and fall asleep atop ground zero of a 1961 nuclear test site, in a 2005 pickup truck on my way home from a 2024 solar eclipse. I would blame their lack of site security, of course, but I would still expect to catch some federal charges.

However, I think there would be one noteworthy scientific outcome from this tragic misadventure: During that one-second free-fall, while me and my truck were thrown six feet into the air... my sphincter would have tightened, more than it has ever tightened before, compressing the contents of my bowels to a million atmospheres of pressure, adiabatically heating it to a temperature of several thousand kelvin.

That’s right--my dying contribution to science would be to poop out the project’s single-greatest success: a 20-ounce crystal of pure diamond forged from the best-tasting nachos I’ve ever had.

Which would be 20 ounces more diamond than they ever recovered from the random chunks of graphite they had buried underground prior to the detonation:


From [5]... Sadly, I couldn't track down a copy of the PNE-112 report that might have provided greater detail.

====================​

There was no campfire... just a few hours’ rest. The next morning we hit Carlsbad Caverns – an epic adventure on its own. So fantastic in fact that I returned later the same year, that time with my wife, insistent that she experience its splendor as well.



But if I happen to grow old enough for my body to outlive my mind... among the final holdouts of a lifetime of memories lost to dementia, will be that of this bizarre late-night escape to Occupied West Texas, and drifting off to sleep parked atop the radioactive cavern of Project Gnome.


White sands, the following evening, on our way to Casa Grande...

====================​

Okay, that was a lot of writing for a bland historical marker in the middle of nowhere, where I happened to sleep for a few hours. But I've had so much fun reading about its history since, I felt compared to share my thoughts with y’all.

Here are some topics for upcoming ‘guess where this is’ posts – hopefully someone other than NOBODY might actually identify their locations, or at least offer a random guess?








References:

[1] The Staff at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, “The Arecibo message of November, 1974.” Icarus (1975). https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(75)90116-5

[2] Weart, W. D. “PARTICLE MOTION NEAR A NUCLEAR DETONATION IN HALITE.” US Atomic Energy Commission, Sandia Corporation, PNE-108F (1963). Available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015095035492

[3] Rawson, D, Boardman, C, and Jaffe-Chazan, N. "THE ENVIRONMENT CREATED BY A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION IN SALT. Project GNOME". US Atomic Energy Commission, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, PNE-107F (1964). https://doi.org/10.2172/4612556

[4] Bennett, W. P., Smith, B. L., and Roberts, D. W. “GNOME POSTSHOT TEMPERATURE AND RADIATION STUDIES. Preliminary Report.” US Atomic Energy Commission, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, PNE-106P (1962). https://doi.org/10.2172/4831396

[5] Rawson, D. E. “Review and summary of some project gnome results.” Eos Trans. AGU, 44(1), 129–135 (1963). https://doi.org/10.1029/TR044i001p00129

 

Teton "Dam"

Let me know where I should pick up my table of bonus points.