When you want to see the stars, find someplace dark
The boat is going from sunrise to sunset every day. In Alaska during midsummer this makes for very long days indeed. Everyone gets a chance to man the helm, taking their turn at the wheel. Boat policy is two people on the bridge at all times, one at the wheel and the other just to keep watch, a second set of eyes for safety. No problem getting volunteers, the best view is from the bridge.
Ice dots the water across the entry, large bergs lie beached near the shore stranded between tides. We pick are way carefully though the crowd, many of the chunks larger that our vessel. The bar across the entry to Tracy Arm is betrayed by a long line of icebergs grounded to reveal the shallow water beneath. Here the history of a thousand winters lies shattered about the landscape like broken glass.
A store from another time… A clapboard sided box just above the harbor. A small room with shelves crammed with everything you could need… Baking soda, potato chips, paper towels, beer and engine oil just over from fishing tackle and charcoal. The cash register is a 1920’s model ordered new from a catalog and shipped across a continent. The front window displays the work of local artists and a rack of postcards for the visitors that wander through in the summer. A hand written sign in the window warns of a bear seen in town a few nights previous. …A store from another time.
The U.S. Coast Guard is tasked with maintaining the many critical navigational aids throughout the waterways of Alaska. Tracy Arm is entered across a narrow gap in a large bar, probably on old glacial moraine across the mouth of the fjord. The channel is marked by two buoys, one had been missing for a few days, ripped from its mooring by the impressive tides that surge across the bar. The buoy was back in place when we arrived, replaced by the crew of the USCG Anthony Petit, a Coast Guard buoy tender.
Just a few crabs in the trap this morning! Tonight’s dinner will be crab cakes with a crab louie salad. We didn’t scrimp on the amount either, the cakes have twice as much crab as the recipe calls for. No problem… there is no better crab in the world than dungeness!
A young black bear, well known to the staff of the Mendenhall Glacier visitor center, is attempting to catch salmon in Steep Creek, just below the visitor center parking lot. He was not too good at it, lots of splashing and no fish to show for the effort. The fish were there, bright red sockeye salmon busy spawning in the stream bed. This was this bear’s first year on his own, still learning the skills of survival.
Yes, I was really this close to the bear, this was a shot with a standard lens, no telephoto. Fortunately there was a small bridge over the creek to provide a slightly safer vantage point. The bear showed no interest in the gathering crowd of sightseers on the bridge, concentrating on the salmon.
Another processed infrared image from Mark Devenot. This time the subject is an everyday scene inside the facility with some of the crew standing in the hallway. The odd feature behind them is actually the large doors that lead into the Keck 1 Telescope dome. Everything looks much different in the thermal infrared…
How powerful is the K1 AO laser?
For someone who has lately been used to working around relatively harmless power levels, beams of a few milliwatts, this is a reminder that lasers are potentially very dangerous. With a milliwatt power level beam there is no danger in getting a hand in the beam, be mindful of your eyes, but otherwise not a lot of concern. This is vastly different, beam power here is measured in tens of watts… The bright yellow beam looks so innocent, appears so harmless. Give that beam a chance, a momentary slip, and it will burn you… badly.
Anything in the beam is at risk, even components we thought were robust enough to withstand the power levels. In this case a reflective ND filter that was to reflect most of the beam into a beam dump, allowing a small amount to continue up the beam train for use in alignments. So much for the ratings on the manufacturer’s data sheet, the beam punched through the coating and even started to melt the glass…
Waimea is a place of rainbows. So common are they here it is a rare day that goes by without at least one rainbow.
But what does a rainbow look like at sunset? When the Sun’s light is reddened by passage through so much air and haze. The bow will begin to lose all color except for red, this creates a red bow…
