Wild Boar Tonight

Wild Boar, Texas Style—too big,

Holland Hotel, Alpine, Texas

Javalina or Wild Boar

x

I’ve seen their diggings in the rocky desert mountains.  Texans hunt them, and last night I tasted their meat -- gamy, tough, meat of a wild digger.  

I have traveled into the past, listening To Rocks, and soon it will be time to go home.  Sunday evening, April 8, should find me in my own bed.

“What are you doing,” he asked. 

“Exploring Pangaea.”

“Why?”

“Because I can.”

“Their lifetimes have passed.” 

“No, they have move into a world they do not recognize.”

I began writing “A New Theory of Time,” and posted it at https://sharonintexas.blogspot.com/2018/03/blog-post.html writing as an observer of another self, something I’ll continue here.

She believes that creatures of the Permian Reef changed the world in which they lived.  Their densely populated cities run 400 miles around the shore of an ancient sea.  Their sprawl was so populous that they knew only crowds.  They piled themselves on top of each other, each performing a task to keep the structure of their city intact.  

They did not keep clocks in their houses.  Instead they listened to their hearts, rhythms of their moods and desires.  But were they only bodies, subject to the laws of electricity and mechanics as electrons or clocks, expressed in the language of physics?  Can they be understood like deductions of Euclidian geometry?   

Without a future to consider, time terminated for them in the present.  Time was discontinuous, and seems  continuous only to us from a distance.  Locality of time, of isolation, in a crowded city.  How could they know a rich variety of life just beyond a mountain of years in which she sees them.  

The texture of time is sticky.  Towns become stuck in some moment of history.  People become stuck in some moment of their lives and do not get free.  Each one who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone. 

Today, they wander into her life, and she thinks of them as bees.  Just as each bee is an unthinking automaton, while the colony of bees performs high thinking, so this colony of brachiopods is given houses made by sponges, glued together with lime-secreting algae.  They provide for the common good, though each one understands little of how it all fits together.  

After their extinction 250 million years ago, there came the age of dinosaurs, and trees that died 216 million years ago.  She sees them as quartz replicas in Petrified Forest, and marvels at how precisely the simple forces of nature has brought them to her attention.  Or are those forces so simple?    

All this happened while tectonic plates were moving land masses about the planet, raising what was under the sea, high into the sky.   

Dikes of  recent magma intrusion,
17 million years ago,
 following paths of least resistance.

Pompei ,Human Fossil 79AD

Then magma punched its way up to the surface, in volcanoes, dikes, sills, and pyroclastic flows.  So abrupt was one flow that people were fossilized in its blast at Pompei in 79AD. 

A fossil is like a footprint in winter snow, a creature frozen in rock, a butterfly mounted in a case, a page in a book, ready to be read.  

I suppose that’s enough for now.  I have much more to share and even more to consider sharing.  

Love to you all, and thanks for following,
Sharon   

Please see a map of the places where I have slept, as updated each day by Michael Angerman:  Sharon in West Texas

Chihuahuan Desert

.

desert plants far apart, uncrowded

beauty solitaire, not shared

with distant neighbors

but with a stranger

passing by 

sun comes up like a visiting planet

not a life-giving force

but everyone stands still

in its presence

night has been long

hope is like wings

energy landing soon  

a cactus living long

knows sunrise so well

its art enfolds it

paints itself

in layers of light. 

 

which came first

sunrise or rocks?

which assumed the color

of the other?  

even the passing grass

in its short-lived way

mimics the rising sun

or is its youthful art

the way for us to follow?

Easter white

does not copy sun

brilliant night and day

nothing better

they seem to say

than purity  

a bee engrossed

in a flower

seems drunk

with the task

in love with the work

or has she fallen in love

with the flower?  

from desert flat

into mountains

from vast vistas

to closeness of peaks

the peaks stand hard

against the sun   

sunrise hits the slopes

and the slopes turn it back

can you not respond

like the flat

like the loving ones? 

in the canyons

life has water

enough to spare

to spread out limbs

and thrive  

green sprouts

reach for the sun

dance with sun

time to relax  

Please see a map of the places where I have slept, as updated each day by Michael Angerman:  Sharon in West Texas

Journey of Photons

(Infrared Telescope Mauna Kea, Hawaii

  

It’s been more than forty years since I was thrust into astronomy.  While working as a land surveyor in Hawaii for land development, my company got the job of setting the alignment for the world’s largest infrared telescope, knowing that is was something completely foreign to any of us.  But they gave the task to me, becauseI had one overriding qualification—I could work at 14,000 feet above sea level at night in temperatures below zero without getting sick.  True astronomic north was needed, and I had to learn how to provide it within five seconds of arc. 

McDonald 107"

McDonald 107"

I moved back to California before that telescope saw first light, and never heard whether or not its alignment was correct—until two days ago.  I’ve kept somewhat in touch with astronomy over the years, and was privileged to meet with a researcher at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, using the 107-inch Harlan J Smith Telescope.  It saw first light in 1968, just a few years before the 142-inch Mauna Kea Infrared.  Both were constructed with techniques of the same era.  I wanted to learn how the 107-inch was tracking.   

We met before nightfall as they were bringing the inside of the dome to the same humidity and temperature  as the outside.  He showed me the two pillars on which the entire mechanism rests, and on which the telescope rotates.  He said its axis is equal to the latitude of this place.  The concrete pillars do not touch the building, but extend five stories down through the building and deep into the ground.  This eliminates most vibrations in the telescope.  

The 180-ton telescope also moves in vertical angle.  A  200-ton counterweight gives balance.  With these two motion it can point almost anywhere in the sky.  

He said, “I will show you something interesting, but you must not say who told you.”  He maneuvered the telescope into horizontal positing so we could look into its tube and see the 107-inch mirror.  Inside the tube, all sorts of braces hold things in place.  I asked if they interfere with incoming light.  He said they do by about thirty-four percent.

I stared into the long tube to an 8000-pound parabolic mirror. I saw what looked like blemishes on it.  “This is the strange and sloppy thing about telescopes,” he said.  “They are exposed to the sky almost every night, and almost anything from bird droppings to leaves to dead insect can get inside and come to rest on the primary mirror.”  Every two years the aluminum coating on the glass gets replaced, and then of course it’s perfectly clean.  But other times it’s hard to get in there and clean it.  

 

Debris interferes less with light than the structural members do, at about three percent loss.  These losses mean is that it takes a longer exposure time to get the resolution we need, but they do not reduce clarity, he said, which seems strange.  

Come nightfall, we retreat to the control room.  The telescope moves on its two axes, and the dome rotates to match the telescope.  These movements are what I wanted to learn about, because they depend on the alignment of the axes to astronomic north, and done during construction.  

The control room is dark and the astronomer has many screens.  On this night, the instrument is pointed toward a star that has a planet revolving around it.  We can’t see the planet, in fact we can’t even see the star.  Instead, we see very fine lines on the screen—a spectrograph.  

Light from the primary mirror ounces off the secondary mirror and down through a hole in the center of the primary mirror.  From here, it bounces and refracts seven more times until it reaches a high precision spectroscope located three floors below us.  The astronomer is not studying an image, he is looking at the various frequencies of light that the star is emitting.  

About ten years ago, a star that is ten light years away showed a dip in the intensity of its light.  The dip has occurred at regular intervals enough time to let us know that a planet is probably orbiting.  Now, using spectroscopy, this astronomer is trying to find out more about an alien planet. 

This screen shows what the telescope is doing as it tracks the star in question.  I could see that the angles of its two axes are given to an accuracy of less the one arc second.  “How can it do that?” I ask, wondering if my 5-second precision in Hawaii was somehow surpassed by the surveyor for this telescope before it was built. 

He said that five seconds is good enough for construction, because once built, we can sight Polaris and make computer adjustments to the motions to give this higher precision. 

Please see a map of the places where I have slept, as updated each day by Michael Angerman:  Sharon in West Texas

New Theory of Time

Extinct Ammonoid on the Permian
Reef Trail, in cross section - my picture

x

Modern Ammonoid - One of the few that
survived the Permian Extinction

x

A Very Twisted Log

x

Please see a map of the places where I have slept, as updated each day by Michael Angerman:  Sharon in West Texasx