Red Sky at Night Gives Me a Fright

The Northern Lights seen in eastern Colorado (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

 This past week has seen the Northern Lights visible as far south as Texas Here in southern Colorado they were photographed in the San Luis Valley, at a latitude of 37° -- pretty far south,

I live surrounded by hills and ridges, with no view of a horizon anywhere except a hint to the northwest. On Wednesday, November 12,  maybe the peak night, I walked Marco the dog after dark and saw nothing but stars. The following night, M. and I drove out to a place with a good view to the east and north, slightly interrupted by the distant lights of Pueblo -- and saw no aurora. Apparently we should have been much farther east, in say Otero or Bent counties, to get the full effect.

But that's OK. I had my "red sky at night" experience back in the Reagan Era, and it was a Cold War Baby's meltdown.

M. and I had been married a short time and were living in a converted summer cottage in Manitou Springs (740 sq. ft.!). Manitou is in a canyon as well, on the western edge of Colorado Springs. It's where the real mineral springs are flowing; the "Springs" in "Colorado Springs" is just real estate developer slop, circa 1875.

I had walked to a friend's house on Ruxton Avenue -- that is the side canyon that goes up to the Pikes Peak Cog Railway station.  I came out well after dark, and the sky to the north was red!

I knew what it meant: Soviet missiles had hit Denver, and more were coming to Colorado Springs, which has lots of military targets. They would impact in seconds. I could never get home to see M. again. 

If we were not all vaporized in the initial blast, we'd be stumbling through a nighttime hell of fire and radiation. This was the end. 

Meanwhile, my rational mind was pounding on the door with both fists: "Dude! It's OK! Those are the Northern Lights! Dude! You're not about to die!" 

After a second or two, the panic drained away. Yes, that was the Aurora borealis, and when I came home, she had been watching it too.

Down at the Colorado Spring Sun office, someone one had re-built the front-page layout to include a color (still rare then) photo of the lights in time to put it on the the presses for distribution the next morning.

I have seen many aurora photos on social media this week. No one has mentioned ICBMs or Mutual Assured Destruction. So that's an improvement.

San Isabel, Where the Internet Ends, Sort of

That mysterious box at lower right.

My friend Galen has been visiting the Lodge at San Isabel since boyhood; me, I probably came first in the late 1980s. On a fishing trip last week, we stopped to photograph this newish sign (not 1930s original), but we noticed something else — the functional pay phone.

The information sheet that you get when asking about the lodge's rental cabins makes it clear: no mobile phone service (unless you have a satphone), no wifi at the lodge or cabins, no broadcast television, and no satellite-based TV or Internet access. (Some homeowners have satellite dishes, of course.) You can borrow DVDs to watch. Messages for guests are posted on a notice board by the main door.

Otherwise, go fishing. Go for a walk. Paddle a kayak. Do something.

It is almost like "the land where the Internet ends," a piece about Green Bank, West Virginia, that ran in the New York Times last month.

Green Bank is home to several giant radio telescopes, all set in a "National Radio Quiet Zone, 13,000 square miles of mountainous terrain with few cell towers or other transmitters." (That sounds a lot like much of the Wet Mountains, if you stay off the ridges.) Scientists studying weak signals from the cosmos want no interference. The area also attract "electrosensitives," people who think that cellular phone signals and other transmissions make them ill.

The writer, Pagan Kenndy, wonders,

Activists have already created “dark sky reserves” to protect wilderness from artificial light. In the future, might we also create “privacy reserves” where we can go to escape the ubiquitous internet?

As it happens, San Isabel is (mostly) in Custer County, where to the west, in the Wet Mountain Valley, there is already a "dark sky reserve" with a website, "star parties" and so on.

She talks to a stranger in line at a convenience store. There is something odd about him.

The man carried himself oddly, with his chest puffed out and his head swiveling as if to scan everything in the store, from the hunting gear to the Little Debbie display case. I thought his posture must have been a remnant from his brain injury, but then realized everybody seemed to be walking around with the same heads-up attitude. Take away the cellphones, it turns out, and you also take away the cellphone hunch. And with nothing else to do but meet one another’s eyes, people talk. 

 Or they are gazing at the lake, watching the ospreys dive, looking to see if the trout are rising.

Maybe I Should Call This "Marginal Galaxy Nature Blog"

Maybe not. I am better at thinking about the migration paths of elk than the migration paths of galaxies. But it is a stunning video. Laniakea means "immeasureable heavens" in Hawaiian. More here.

Big Comet Coming

It is supposed to be a bright one:

National Geographic reports C/2012 S1 is expected to pass at about 6.2 million miles/10 million kilometers (0.07 AU (10,000,000 km; 6,500,000 mi) from Mars on October 1, 2013. This will allow NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars opportunity to snap pictures.

Astronomers at the Remanzacco Observatory, Italy have assured that the comet is not on collision course with Earth. They say C/2012 S1 "will get to within 0.012AU of the Sun at the end of November 2013 and then to ~0.4AU (about 37 million miles) from Earth at the beginning of January 2014."