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

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

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A Very Twisted Log

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

Permian Reef

Sunrise on the Chihuahuan Desert

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Looking up from the trailhead
to the crest of Permian Reef

What is a layman to believe when experts disagree?  At the monastery I heard the good teaching of St. Benedict.  And I learned that only Catholics go to heaven.  And on the Permian Reef yesterday, I tried to reconcile theories on how these rocks and fossils got here. 

I climbed above the Chihuahuan Desert to read Scripture written in stone.  If you know the language, sedimentary rocks read like a book, younger pages laid down on older ones, one after another.  Each layer was the earth’s surface until another layer came on top.  Disputes come, not over Scripture’s validity, but over interpretation. 

The dark area is where I added water
to make the fossils  more visible

So many fossils all piled together and
cemented with even smaller organisms

After these sediments settled in an ocean some 280 million years ago, movement of tectonic plates raised them; then erosion cut them away.  Change from deposition to uplift to erosion—that’s the theory that seems best to explain what I saw. 

When Texas was at the Bottom of the sea, a reef of living things built up near the shore as reefs do today.  But this reef was made of plants and animals that have mostly disappeared—except as preserved as fossils.  We call it the Permian Reef.  

Ammonoid in cross section

I hiked with notes and pictures from study of this fascinating structure, hoping to find some truth about this world’s distant past.  

Sediment, like memory, like dirt in my palm, hardened into rock.  As childhood memories are revealed through contact with people of like minds, so these rock layers give up their origins through contact with inquisitive minds.  I am no expert in geology, but truth seems coming just the same.  

Top of the Reef

From the top of Permian Reef, I look down to where I started, and with a telescope, can see where my car is parked  

They say that from high places like this, looking out through clear air over miles of flat desert, that you can see the curvature of the earth.  It might be camera distortion or it might be the true. 

The Trail winds Downward

Reefs are a fascinating fusion of biology and geology.  They are made of stone—but built by life.  Although the individual life-forms are typically tiny, the results of their activities can be gigantic, resulting in massive transformation of landscape.  

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

Land of Enchantment

White Sands national Monument

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Reaching upward for spring

Reaching upward for spring

Not so far back into unfathomable eons today.  Just a year ago, the voice of a monk seeking the voice of God, thought he had heard and knocked on my door at the Pecos Benedictine Monastery.  So drawn was I by his generosity that I returned.  

The lake where fishers of men seek trout for dinner and where its peace draws them closer to the Church and farther from secular concerns.  

Brother Joseph feeding ducks and other visitors, words of comfort and separation.

My footsteps in desert dunes lead, if I follow the booms to where that first atomic bomb shook the entire world.  White Sands Missile Range tested something today, and I, just a few miles away walked on shifting sands of history.  

Waves on a sea of wind-driven sand, only the speed is slower. And I can walk on this sea. 

night retreats in sunrise

new day comes to old sand

echoes of old bombs

still vibrate

in the distance

my shadow reaches far ahead

as if I’m already there.

new light on old sand   

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

Forest of Rocks

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Clouds in the sky move about like tectonic plates on the earth.  Only long time separates obvious from the obscure.   

I drove from Flagstaff, Arizona to Gallup, New Mexico, via Petrified Forest National Park.  And there, lying all over the ground are logs made of rock.  They seem begging us to discover how they look like logs but are made of solid rock.  Walt Disney could not have made more realistic logs.  So let’s give it a shot: 

You can still see the knots in this log

The Triassic was the first period of the Mesozoic Era.  That’s a way of saying that it happened between 251 million and 199 million years ago.  After the greatest mass extinction of all time, at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, a forest grew here.  That’s when these rock logs were living trees.   

The late Triassic is best known for the rise of dinosaurs.  Eventually they replaced all those extinct monsters of the Permian. Thirty million years later, at the beginning of the Jurassic, dinosaurs dominated the earth, and survived for the next 180 million years.  Back then, almost every large animal was a dinosaur.  Some of their fossils were found here in Petrified Forest.

These logs were living trees about 216 million years ago.  They died and fell into a river, and got buried under layers of sediment that protected them from decay.  Ground water carried silica into the logs, cell by cell, replicating their structure in almost perfect detail.   The silica became hard quartz and took on many colors.  These logs are made up of almost solid quartz

All this happened while tectonic plates were moving about on the earth, shifting the rock of these fossils some 2100 miles to the northeast, from its tropical origin where Costa Rica is today, to Petrified Forest National Park.  Erosion then stripped away the softer materials around these relics, revealing their unlikely past for easy viewing today. 

In the above description I have reworded science-talk from experts, but I think it’s pretty close to the truth as we know it.  Truth, of course, is not always what we think it is, so I welcome your comments, especially if you love geology as I do.

I wonder what native Americans thought about these improbable logs when they inscribed these figures on a nearby cliff.  

Later in this trip, we will move further back in time to that lush fauna of the Permian, which in its dying, allowed modern life forms to grow. 

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