Fdip385: Solar Eruptions

When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

The Dividendations, number 385.

April 27th, 2024.

Solar Eruptions.

We had an eclipse today of the sun over the United States of America.

Amazing.

The moon blotted out the sun to show us the corona, the crown, the light.

It gives us time to think where we sit in the cosmos, in the big, big space that we fill.

Our own space.

Adam Tinkoff, host of the Chasing Miles podcast.

We won't worry about the traffic, worry about the radio, worry about the phone.

Thoughts, opinions, observations, and rambling diatribes composed during distance long runs.

I'm Steve Runner.

Adam Tinkoff, host of the Chasing Miles podcast.

And he gave me what I think was a direct order to record something here on Fidipidations.

So here we are.

I should also mention that one of my all-time favorite podcast heroes, Kevin Gwynn,

host with the most from the Extra Mile podcast, was on with Adam a few weeks ago.

Check out the Chasing Miles podcast on Apple, Amazon, Podchaser, iHeart, and YouTube.

Today, I'm going to tell you a story about my solar eclipse experience and its aftermath.

And give you an update on my foot reconstruction surgery and

my plans to return to the road and assume, once again, the role of Steve Runner.

But first, here's what I've been reading.

I've finished Red Rising, Golden Sun and Morning Star by Pierce Brown,

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Graham, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl,

Nixon, Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing by Olga Mecking,

and

The Redemption of Time by Bao Xu, which is a fan-written novel considered fourth in the

Three-Body Problems series by Lu Chixen.

Right now, I'm reading two books, as I usually do.

Stephen King's Billy Summers, which is a novel about a hitman for hire who happens to have a

conscience, and a book I've been meaning to read for years by the American biologist P.Z. Myers,

titled,

The Happy Atheist.

Baseball is back.

I was fortunate enough to go to Florida and had a great week with my wife at spring training baseball games

and lounging on the beaches of Sanibel.

The Red Sox look...

They looked good in spring training, let's put it that way.

But I'm just so happy baseball's back.

And I've been to a Woo Sox.

I've been to a Woo Sox game, our Worcester Red Sox, and I look forward to going to many more this summer.

Now, on to my story.

Because I awoke at 5.30 in the morning on Monday, April 8th, 2024, showered, and jumped into my

already-loaded Honda Passport with telescopes, tripods, camera supports and adapters, three iPads,

two iPhones, and a MacBook Air.

I also packed a folding beaker.

Each chair, a can of gasoline, or petrol if you like, a sweater, winter jacket, gloves, winter hat,

and a variety of eye protection filters, glasses, and welding glass.

I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts for an extra large regla and proceeded northbound from the quaint New England

village of Oxford, Massachusetts, towards the picturesque hamlet of North Stratford, New Hampshire,

a mere 200 miles.

Twenty-six miles and roughly four hours away from my home.

Located in Coos County, North Stratford is an unincorporated community located in the northwest

corner of the town of Stratford, along the Connecticut River, and next to the town of

Bloomfield, Vermont, population 217.

It was an unnaturally warm and cloudless day for New England.

With temperatures nearing 65 degrees Fahrenheit, call that about 18 degrees Celsius, with a light

wind blowing from the west.

Curiously, I may not have been the only human with similar plans in play as the traffic began to build

the closer I got to New Hampshire.

My brother Mark and his amazing wife Chrissy had the logic and common sense to have spent the night

up north.

And were waiting for me further north in the town of Colebrook, which, according to

SCIENCE, meant that they would observe four additional seconds of totality when the moment

arrived.

I, however, had found an empty field, recently harvested for oats and barley, where the uneven

heaps of grasses had dried enough to support an amateur astronomer such as your humble host.

I had found an empty field, which, according to science, meant that they would observe four additional seconds of totality when the moment arrived.

I arrived to said field and placed a call to my brother, who warned me that where he was was overcrowded

with eclipse observers, and that the parking was no longer a thing in Colebrook, New Hampshire.

And so I bid him clear skies and set up my makeshift observation desk in the center of some farmer's field.

I felt confident that he would not oppose.

Others began to approach.

And by 1 p.m., an hour and 16 minutes prior to the start of the lunar shadow, there were roughly 20 or so individuals planted in that field with their own equipment ready and calibrated.

I was likewise prepared, with my refractor telescope connected to my personal iPhone, shielded by welding glass, another iPhone magnetically attached to my camera tripod to capture the horizon.

I was likewise prepared, with my refractor telescope connected to my personal iPhone, shielded by welding glass, another iPhone magnetically attached to my camera tripod to capture the horizon in eclipse using the time-lapse feature of the camera application.

Two iPads set up on the ground, one as a backup to the iPhone capturing the time-lapse, and another set up specifically to capture, in real time, the passage of the moon's shadow across the field.

My MacBook was by my side, tracking the sun and moon across North America,

and a single cellular tower providing internet access to all my various gadgets.

And so, I sat down, with my Kindle, to wait.

I read a bit, and put the book down, and took a deep breath of the clean mountain air, and just enjoyed a moment.

It was now 1.45 p.m. in the afternoon, with only 30 minutes till showtime.

When I started to come to a realization, what's more important, being there, or capturing some video evidence that I had been there?

It's a simple question.

All around me, good people were calibrating high-definition telescopes, attaching their phones to selfie sticks, webcasting to their friends outside of the path of totality,

to bring the...

To bring the...

And I admit,

Oh, fellow runners,

I admit I am so guilty

of running road races and marathons with a microphone,

with dual thoughts of pace, hydration,

with dual thoughts of pace, hydration, podcast segment times,

drop-in, live reports on local and Australian radio…

Yeah, I once ran Boston, while I was reporting LIVE on some radio station in Sydney.

I've missed the full experience of those prototypes,

of those moments for the purpose of preserving those moments. And then here I am with only

minutes away to a two minute and 40 second event that will never occur again in my lifetime.

And I had not bothered to think about how I would spend that time. Two minutes and 40 seconds.

Would I podcast live? Would I be staring into the eyepiece of a telescope, checking on the

recording of my various cameras, worrying about the exposure levels and focus? That's when I decided

to ignore the gadgets and step back, take a seat, and observe something special with my own

protected eyes.

I decided to become present. The total eclipse of the sun began in North Stratford, New Hampshire

at exactly 2.16 p.m. on the afternoon of April 8th, 2024. The first phenomena to occur was the

crescent shadow and first contact, where the moon situated a mere 238,800

miles from the earth, passed before the sun, located a whopping 92,955,287 miles away.

It takes eight minutes for a photon from the sun to reach the earth.

I saw the moon begin to travel across the face of the sun,

as if someone had taken a bite out of that G-type main sequence star. The skies slowly began to

darken. The clear blue sky began to dim as the field below began churning eerie shades of yellow

to amber. This lasted about 30 minutes or so, until the second phenomena began to take place.

Thus began

the second contact phase. With just two minutes to go until totality, most of the sun had been

covered, and the temperature dropped from 66.3 degrees to exactly 53.7 degrees Fahrenheit,

a drop of 12.6 degrees according to my H5074 Govee hydrometer thermometer. I had to put a coat on,

and the wind started to pick up, and it was cold. The birds in the surrounding trees

had quieted down, and with my eclipse glasses clipped to my eyeglasses, I saw the emergence

of the so-called Bailey's beads as the sunlight shined through the craters and valleys of the moon.

It was beautiful. I saw a total of seven beads until they began to wink out, leaving only a

single bead of light as if the apparition had become some giant diamond ring in space, until

the third phase. Totality. And the 20 or so of us in the farmer's field in northern New Hampshire

had to go. I had to go. I had to go. I had to go. I had to go. I had to go. I had to go. I had to go.

There is no way for me to aptly describe for you what I saw. I'm going to try. I have been trying.

But no words or photos that you may have seen can describe it with justice. I can tell you

it was beautiful. It was profound.

It was an alignment of the solar system that serves as a gentle reminder of one's physical

place in the ever-expanding universe. The total eclipse of the sun makes us feel

both insignificant and privileged. How fortunate am I to have been born

seven billion years after the initial expansion of this cosmos, before the distance and dispersion

of all the visible matter gravitationally interacting with each other fades to invisibility,

while possessing the cognitive ability to understand these things. It was beautiful,

humbling, and wonderful.

That's not a good enough description for you. If you didn't see it, I wish that you had.

And if you did see it, I hope you weren't spending the few minutes of totality

centering the secondary mirror of your Newtonian reflector telescope on the axis of the focus or

draw tube. I hope you weren't checking your cameras or taking selfies with your iPhone,

tweeting or X-ing, uploading to Insta, TikTok, Facebook,

or Instagram, wishing for some likes. Because I'm not the smartest goofy little podcaster that

you'll listen to today, and I'm certainly not a subject matter expert on anything,

but I figured this one thing out, and I feel pretty good about it.

I experienced the total eclipse of the sun for 2 minutes and 40 seconds,

and it's something I'll never forget.

When totality...

When totality arrives in the third stage of the phenomenon,

you can take off your protective glasses and look directly at the eclipse.

The sun's corona, a broiling, hot sheath of electrically charged plasma, ionized gas,

above the chromosphere of the solar surface, manifests itself visually as a majestic halo

against the black emptiness.

I saw that.

And then, to the right of the solar corona, a red bubble appeared,

a prominence of plasma erupting 200,000 miles from the surface of the sun.

I saw that.

I wish you could have been there, looking up 50 degrees above the horizon.

In the dark now, the planets Saturn and Mars,

are in occultation to the lower left, southwest of the eclipse and 25 degrees above the horizon.

Also, Venus, shining brightly along the same ecliptic, at just 40 degrees and to our right.

In the southeast, 60 degrees above the horizon, emerges the gas giant Jupiter,

along with various bright magnitude stars, in this now, 3.30 in the afternoon, dark evening sky.

Along the horizon, it's twilight.

From where we're standing along the Connecticut River, at an elevation of 896 feet or 273 meters,

the Earth's edge is about 12 miles or 18 kilometers away, and it remains daytime there.

Where we're standing, it's night, with the sun's rays shining feebly,

360 degrees around us.

Everywhere we look, around the horizon, it's dusk.

But here, it's nighttime, and the stars are out.

And that's what I experienced.

Sitting in a beach chair, wrapped up warm, in a winter jacket, in the silence of nature,

as our moon,

passed gently, across our sun.

And now it's time, as Paul Harvey used to say,

for the rest of the story.

The drive home was a painful, frustrating, 10-hour traffic jam of like-minded observers.

I was trapped in a 25-mile line of traffic, in the dark back roads of New Hampshire,

moving at an average of 4 miles per hour, for a duration of 8 hours,

before I made it to Route 93, and the 2-hour drive from there to my home.

I was in bed, exhausted, by 2.30 a.m.

Which wouldn't have been a problem, except that I had a 7.30 a.m. dentist appointment the next morning.

Which means, I had only a hand.

I had a handful of hours of sleep, and a long workday ahead of me,

which started with what we call in the IT business, a major incident,

that churned the stress level up to 11.

I didn't know it then, but I was in a classic immunocompromised state of being.

I started to notice a growing headache,

that evening of Tuesday, April 9th.

A headache quite immune to the traditional painkiller technology,

such as Tylenol and Ibuprofen.

I caught up on some sleep that night, and woke up with a strange rash on the right side of my face,

and an increasingly pounding, yet intermittent headache,

that was quite unlike any ache of the noggin that I'd experienced before.

I managed...

to make it through this day, this now being the 10th of April, a Wednesday,

and with the thanks of the good folks at Johnson and Johnson,

I was able to make it all the way until Friday the 12th,

when the pain and rash were beginning to seem like a problem.

My wife insisted that I go to see a doctor.

I laughed at such a proposition,

because I am all-knowing and all logical,

and my

vast medical experience of nothing was evidence to my expertise on the subject. I'll be fine,

I insisted, much to my wife's chagrin, and went to bed early that night. Now, it's Saturday,

April 13th, and not being inhibited by numerology or triskaidakophobia, I went happily with

pounding brain to my granddaughter Vivi's christening. It was after the post-event party

that an incessant, pulsating, periodic, knife-stabbing agony in the center of my brain

became a problem that I felt a doctor might want to review. So, this time, my idea was

to go to the local urgent care facility in town. Now, at this point, because I was now a monocular

being, did I mention that the rash had spread to my right eyelid and was crusted shut? No,

I didn't mention that. Well, I couldn't see out of my right eye, and you kind of need that for

proper vision and all. Anyway, I went to the urgent care facility, which is an excellent place to go

if you have a high fever.

Bad cut, superficial injury, burn, allergy, bronchitis, or infection.

It is not, it turns out, as I learned after an hour and a half of sitting there in agony,

squeezing my skull, wishing it to stop the hurt. It is not a place to go if you have developed

ocular,

shingles.

Ah, yes, good old herpes zoster ophthalmicus of the eye, with blisters, burning, throbbing, rash,

blurry, unreasonable agony in the very center of the brain, affecting the trigeminal nerve,

the fifth and largest cranial nerve in your head, and the ophthalmic nerve, which is a terminal

branch of the trigeminal nerve.

And a nerve that you never, stop, listen to me, it's a nerve that you never want to piss off.

Mine was screaming at me.

Not with angry voices, but with violent jabs of pain that would assault me every five to ten

seconds for a duration of two to three seconds.

Ah, yes.

I had been vaccinated, first in December 1st of 2018, and again on February 17th of 2019.

But vaccinations are never designed to be perfect, and the Shingrix vaccine is only 97% effective.

And it turns out, fellow runners, that I was in the 3% of those doomed to suffer from shingles anyway.

I'll spare you the...

painful details, but I was able to overcome the worst of the symptoms,

thanks to heavy medication and constant sleeping for a week.

I'm on the tail end of recovery as I record this, and the pain is persistent, but not unmanageable.

I'm only going to say this once, and I say this as a member of the 3% of vaccinated patients

who got shingles anyway.

But trust me on this.

You never want to get shingles.

Ever.

And if you ever had chicken pox when you were a kid, just get vaccinated.

You never want to suffer as much as I did last week.

No.

No, no, no, no buts.

No but vaccines can cause explosive communicatable zombieism.

Just take the final...

You do not want to get shingles.

Ever.

Okay?

Am I clear?

Good.

And that's the aftermath of my experience watching the total eclipse of the sun.

You have been listening to Fidipidations, number 385, Solar Eruptions.

Theme music by Jim Fidler at jimfidler.com.

The cover road composed by Ger Wolf at gerwolf.com.

Fidipidations is protected under a Creative Commons license and distributed by Liberated

Syndication.

At libsyn.com.

Well, it's been four months since my right foot reconstruction surgery, a surgery that

I underwent so that I could return to the road and start running again.

And my foot is doing well.

Formally a size nine and a half, its new shape is that of an anatomical structure, three

additional levels in size than it was pre-surgery.

My left foot is a nine and a half.

My new right foot is a 12 and a half.

So just call me flop-footed lefty.

But pain?

Not really.

Just some weird discomfort and slow healing incisions that look like stigmata wounds.

I'm not quite ready to start running, but I'm getting close.

And that squeaky door will open soon.

I do have a decision to make at some point about the removal of hardware in that foot.

Two 6.5mm.

x 5mm bone headless cantilated compression short thread titanium screws and a kit compression

15x15mm speed titan osteotomy implant on my right metatarsal.

The foot has almost completely healed and the bone is almost fully remodeled.

But I need to start running before I decide if I really need the implants removed.

If I feel no pain by the end of the summer,

I may just leave them in.

We'll see.

So, thank you for listening to another edition of Fidipidations,

the podcast for runners,

produced by a guy who calls himself Steve Runner,

but hasn't really been able to for a while.

I promise you.

And more importantly,

I promise myself that I will be back,

huffing and puffing in a good way,

out along the streets,

of the quaint New England town of Oxford, Massachusetts.

And we'll be out there together,

right here,

on this goofy little podcast.

And please note that the next total eclipse of the sun will take place on August 12th, 2026,

and be visible in Greenland,

Iceland,

Spain,

Russia,

and a small area of Portugal.

If you're out there listening or can get out there to watch,

I highly recommend it.

A partial eclipse is cool and interesting,

but a total eclipse?

A total eclipse of the sun is a spectacular convergence of Copernican alignment

that demonstrates the power of science and our being present in a beautiful universe.

I'm Steve Runner,

reminding you that

to run long,

and taper.