Routine patrol

Al Denelsbeck

While this doesn’t happen daily, I frequently do a patrol of the sprawling acreage of Walkabout Estates to see how things are coming along (as well as watering all the ‘tended’ plants, which can take some time anymore.) It’s not the best of ideas to ‘watch plants grow,’ really, because they’re better off being seen at least a week apart, but it’s necessary to know what might need tending.

potted hydrangea
I think this is an ‘Early Rosa’ variety of hydrangea, but whatever – it’s The Girlfriend’s, and it got an early start in the greenhouse so it’s positively bursting now. It’s potted, and staying on the back deck to keep it away from the deer, who completely stripped another hydrangea that we had out front – we thought fatally, but it appears to be bouncing back now, and gets regular treatment with the deer repellent.

[By the way, we use recipe #2 here, because it was the only one that wouldn’t spoil immediately, and boy howdy does it work – I mixed a batch middle of last summer and it protected countless plants. The deer will try a few leaves and realize it tastes wretched, then mostly ignore it for the rest of the year, though we reapply after heavy rains. One batch lasts a while, and I only dilute it into a spray bottle as needed.]

The hydrangea flowers are looking vibrant.

closer look at 'Early Rosa' hydrangea flowers
I prefer blues over pinks and reds, but this is fine, and variety is necessary.

Nearby, the hosta is taking over.

hosta forming backdrop for lawn ornament
Formerly planted, I had to pull out two of these plants to open up the fence for the shed to come in, and they remained in pots and thrived, so we left them there. Despite not being in the greenhouse, they got an early start themselves and both now spread like a meter wide, forming a nice backdrop for one of the lawn decorations – you know I was pushing for a heron/egret.

empty greenhouse shelves
The greenhouse sits almost forlornly, only housing a trio of starter pots to keep them away from the squirrels – everything else is out now, and most of it transplanted into the yards.

potted basil plants starting to recover
The basil plants out front struggled with both a cold snap and a slug attack, but appear to be bouncing back now, which is great because both The Girlfriend and I love basil. A large number of seeds are also planted in pots and making their start now. I miss the soil at the old place, which produced a forest of basil and allowed us to make our own pesto one year (which came out great!)

oak-leaf hydrangea hydrangea quercifolia showing flowers
Finally, we have two oak-leaf hydrangeas (Hydrangea quercifolia) in the yard, which you’ve seen before, and they’re blooming out nicely now. This one in The Jungle is spreading madly and healthily, but the one along the front walk needs to be shaped, and that can take place after these flowers fade. The flowers aren’t anywhere near as pretty as the Early Rosa up there, but the leaves turn gorgeous colors in the fall, not to mention the bushes get several times the size, so we’re good.

And, uh, you did notice that there’s a critter in every photo, right? That’s the other thing that I’m patrolling for, and will give you an idea what I find. All of these really came from just today, and just the yard, though with a little more time I’d probably achieve more variety.

Not even 24 hours

Al Denelsbeck

rising moon with 'ring' line of clouds
Man, I didn’t even make it a full day with an empty ‘Sort’ folder before adding to it, and I’m far from done for the evening. People tell me I’ve got a problem, that I “need to seek help,” but that’s nonsense – I can quit any time I like.

Just not right now – there are more images to capture. Can’t let someone else get them while I don’t. Plus it’s just photos; there are worse addictions out there. Not like this even is an addiction. There’s no comparison really. It’s a waste of time to even discuss this.

No, this is not the eclipse – it’s just after moonrise, with some handy little clouds to add character. Would you have passed this up? Okay then…

By the way, conditions are still up in the air (Ha!) It’s not clear what the clouds are going to do in the next few hours, so decent pics are far from guaranteed. We’ll just have to see…

You got a problem?

Al Denelsbeck

Tonight was sorting night, because I’d finally gotten enough photos in the folder to make it worthwhile, so I put on the Geologic Podcast and hemmed and hawed over whether each image made the cut or not – over a thousand before sorting, if you must know, though how many I retained I haven’t bothered to tally. I know there’s one post scheduled to appear, if by, ‘scheduled,’ you mean, ‘not scheduled, but eventually,’ and I edited the photos for that before the sorting began. And typically, I found a handful of others to feature, some of which I now include, because I hadn’t noticed the details until the sort.

parent Canada geese Branta canadensis with five goslings in water
This one I’d already prepped for a post, though I had nothing specific in mind other than, “This is the goose family I saw one evening.” Canada geese of course (Branta candensis,) with this year’s brood. We go in for a closer look.

quintet of Canada goslings Branta canadensis cruising between parents
No big deal, just passing by, no concerns. This is just the setup.

quintet of Canada goslings Branta canadensis with the first taking notice
And then, the first in line seemed to notice me on shore with the long lens, as if to say, “Is that legal public observation, or does the focal length now constitute invasion of privacy?” You may think I’m reading a lot into it, but I’ve seen that look before. You know, people really don’t like long lenses on public beaches for some reason…

quintet of Canada goslings Branta canadensis all starting to notice
In the very next frame, now three of them were doing it, with one more kinda getting into the spirit – I hadn’t noticed this at the time, or I would have started getting creeped out. You see this and you start to wonder if you can convincingly mimic an alert karate stance.

Speaking of mimicking, I note that the mother was not doing this, meaning they weren’t taking her cue, as is their wont, so why I was suddenly getting the side-eye, I can’t say. Maybe they were all Nikon supporters or something. Maybe it was the cargo shorts. You never know.

Casual shooting

Al Denelsbeck

Between being deep in projects, and not really motivated by the same ol’ photo subjects, I haven’t been doing a lot of shooting. I mean, there’s plenty to see around Walkabout Estates, but I’m trying to branch out a bit and do new things, which will likely require a trip someplace, while see that bit about projects. But I’m getting a handful of subjects while I’m kicking around here.

likely pregnant Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis on planter
Right out front, a Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) has been appearing regularly on or near the Japanese maple, and I’ve been watching its girth carefully. By now, I’m almost certain: it’s a female, and she’s pregnant, though you didn’t hear that from me. Of course, I am very unlikely to see any follow-up to this, because she isn’t about to give birth on the front steps, so I won’t get confirmation until the newborn ventures out, probably weeks from now. It’s still good to see the progression though.

A few meters off, another was perched on one of the branches where I’d attached a mantis egg case.

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis perched on branch with Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis ootheca
This was the ootheca/egg case that didn’t seem to fare well this year, and with the anoles hanging out so close, I’m skeptical of the fate of the survivors as well – they’re too likely to be anole food. That’s how it goes, though.

You’ll notice how dark this one is, and it’s almost certainly due to the nights being chilly so the anole was darker to absorb more solar radiation in the morning. My suspicion that this was also a female was soon dismissed, however.

likely male Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis displaying dewlap
Several days back, while observing an anole on the back fence, it started displaying with its dewlap, like seen here. Typically, this is either a territorial or courting display, but at the time, I could spot no other anole (which doesn’t mean a lot) and the displaying male seemed to be more oriented towards me. I had a vague suspicion that this display was intended for me, telling me to get lost, though I’d never heard of them doing it for humans. And then today, this one did the same, and again, I found no indication of another anole – indeed, this one had been basking until I ventured too close, and the overall color doesn’t fit with the other reasons for displaying that I’ve seen. So now I’m on a quest to determine if this really was the case.

In the early evening, I spotted my next subject and vowed to go in and get the macro rig, then forgot about it for a while. When I finally returned, it took me a little bit to find it again, and once I did, the subject was reluctant to give me the poses that I was after.

male magnolia green jumping spider Lyssomanes viridis under leaf
This is a male magnolia green jumping spider (Lyssomanes viridis,) which I haven’t seen too often before. Unfortunately, this frame is slightly confusing, and I apologize for that, but between the gusting wind this evening and the spider’s reluctance to keep facing me, this was the best that I got. You can tell it’s a male through the oversized chelicerae, the long appendages with the brown stripes running down them, and the pedipalps, the smaller arms flanking the chelicerae with the club ends that are the same hue. While I glimpsed this during the session, I didn’t capture a decent image of the wandering eyes. The wind kept video out of the question, so I let this one be after a handful of shots.

Out front, I was delighted to spot something in a drain trough that I’m not sure I’ve ever spotted in NC, which is curious since they appear all throughout the area. So I captured it for a quick closeup session.

ring-necked snake Diadophis punctatus coiled up in terrarium
This is a ring-necked snake (Diadophis punctatus) – very slender, narrower than a pencil, and only a bit longer; I think this one topped out at about 25cm, but I didn’t try measuring it. It was definitely not complacent about being handled, writing constantly and defecating on my hands (the smell of which takes forever to eradicate,) and it got only slightly more cooperative in the terrarium – it took long enough to get the head out into plain sight. I wanted one other detail, but it wasn’t going to happen without a lot of playing around or, for preference, a handler, but The Girlfriend doesn’t like snakes, even as small as this one was, and wouldn’t have appreciated the aromatic treatment of her hands. So I have just the barest illustration for you.

tailmof ring-necked snake Diadophis punctatus showing hint of yellow underbelly
The belly of ring-necked snakes is a brilliant lemon yellow, even more vivid than their necks – one day I’ll show this better. But I wanted this one to stick around and it was already pretty anxious, so I released it immediately after these images into the same location as found, and we’ll see if it appears again later on.

Dark of the moon

Al Denelsbeck

If you’re in the eastern half of the US or Mexico, eastern third of Canada, or anywhere in Central and South America, there will be a total lunar eclipse on Sunday evening (May 15th) – see here for times for your area. The moon will be passing deep into the Earth’s shadow, so totality will last over 90 minutes – you can use Stellarium to plot the directions and altitudes to see if you can lay out a nice tableau.

Present weather reports call for partly cloudy conditions here that night, so we’ll just have to see how that develops. Maybe I’ll be back Tuesday with some eclipse pics, maybe not.

I’d recommend focusing manually on the full moon before the eclipse begins, checking the images at high magnification as needed, and when you nail focus, lock that focus position and leave it alone. Bear in mind that, at totality, the exposure time may stretch out pretty long, long enough for motion blur from the passing moon to soften the image, so boost ISO as it goes closer to totality to keep the shutter speed as short as possible. Set White Balance to ‘Daylight’ to keep the colors accurate.

Screen capture from Stellarium plotting double eclipse
Stellarium revealed another little tidbit: somewhere just before midnight EDT, the moon will eclipse a 6th magnitude star while totally eclipsed itself – this may be worth capturing on video (lock that tripod tight!) While everything in the sky moves east to west, the moon is slightly slower than the stars, so the eclipsed star (HIP 76033 A, if you need to know) will disappear against the lower left portion of the moon, seemingly backwards. This is also why the lunar eclipse itself seems to progress backwards from the apparent motion in the sky.

So, have at it, and good luck!

near-total lunar eclipse of November 2021 showing distinct earthglow
This was last year’s, not-quite-total eclipse

Visibly different, part 19

Al Denelsbeck

pair of pileated woodpeckers Dryocopus pileatus in JN Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge
Our opening image today comes from 1995, my first trip alone to Florida, dedicated to nature photography. I was starting to get serious about it, but was still using older Olympus equipment and print film, and this was taken with a Vivitar 75-260mm lens. I was in JN “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island and lucked onto this pair of pileated woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus.) I was absolutely delighted, not just to photograph one for the first time, but to get a pair in such good conditions. I initially believed this to be male and female, but I now suspect, from appearance, that the one on the left is a juvenile. Pileateds are large, almost the size of crows, and have distinctive calls and habits, but they remained at least a bit secretive every place that I’d lived.

Notably, immediately after this visit, I went literally across the street to a wildlife rehab and education center, CROW (Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife) and attended a presentation that was conveniently scheduled for only a few minutes after my arrival. I was active in wildlife rehab at that point and took the opportunity to examine their facilities and efforts, including chatting with one of the presenters for a while afterwards. We did this in sight of a large outdoor cage housing a captive pileated, an adult male with an amputated wing that could not be released and thus served as a resident ambassador and conditioning assistant. The presenter there told me of the wild pileated that lived in the refuge and would come over from time to time to drum territorially on the main cage supports, driving the resident within nearly apoplectic since it could not reach the intruder on the outside of the cage to drive him off. Within minutes, I got to see this firsthand, though my camera remained in the car for some reason.

In the intervening 27 years, I’ve seen pileateds perhaps a dozen times, obtaining photographs somewhere around half that – one of the earliest posts here was about one visiting the place where I worked. It didn’t take too long before I considered the initial image up there to be pretty crappy, yet I wasn’t snagging any really decent portraits – better, surely, but not what I considered impressive.

Until last summer.

closeup profile of male pileated woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus
I probably don’t have any better illustration of my progress in photography than these, but let’s examine the significant changes. Equipment, surely (Olympus OM-10 with Vivitar 76-260mm versus Canon 7D with Tamron 150-600mm,) and finally getting a decent opportunity contributed hugely. At the same time, my ability to instantly recognize the calls, flight profile, and plumage as it passed in flight were major factors, as well as tracking the fleeting glimpses to realize that it had landed on the ground. And then, the careful and patient creeping forward, using treetrunks to disguise my movements multiple times, until I could get close enough to lean out slowly and fire off several frames; I wouldn’t say that this was my best accomplishment of stalking, but it certainly produced the goods. You can’t control luck, but on occasion you can control how well you exploit it.

For a given “World,” anyway

Al Denelsbeck

black-capped chickadee Poecile atricapillus peering down from tree stump
Hey, you know what this coming Saturday (May 14th) is?

Well, it depends on where you are, really. If you’re in the US or Canada, it’s World Migratory Bird Day, so get out and find a migratory world to give to your bird. Or something. Give the bird to… no, that can’t be right. But I’d suggest going out and seeing how many species you can spot, or photograph, or do some research on, or make some new nest boxes, or set up some inviting habitat, or teach kids about, or, you know, something related to migratory birds, to show you’re not nature-hostile or Republican or whatever. Of course, this may be falling late for anyone from the mid-latitudes south, because the migratory birds have already arrived and thus nest boxes and so on would be late, but do something anyway.

As I discovered not too many days back, should you be in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central or South America, World Migratory Bird Day is the second Saturday in October. Makes a little sense, since those are the southern destinations for various species migrating south, and about the time that they’re doing it, so timed for their arrival in either case; how this escaped my attention before, I’ll never know, but I’ll blame it on US-centric Google (I’m now using Ecosia as a search engine.) If you’re in the rest of the world, apparently it’s not the right world because there is no World Migratory Bird Day celebrated therein, despite the fact that birds also migrate between Europe and Africa in the appropriate months. Maybe if I switched to Gügel as a search engine…

All that aside, you’ve had enough warning now to cancel those wedding plans, blow off the family reunion, postpone the trip to the ISS – whatever – and watch some birds instead. You can show this post to anyone protesting, because my name carries that much clout – my search engine says so (I’m also getting so handsome.) Enjoy yourself!

trio of double-crested cormorants Nannopterum auritum flying in formation

Not as efficient

Al Denelsbeck

So after the lightning images last night, I went out into the backyard a couple hours later and noticed that the moon was quite bright and clear – the clouds had vanished entirely. The peak of the Eta Aquariids had been the previous night, but the ‘storm’ really lasts for a couple of weeks, or at least, the Earth is in some contact with the debris trail that causes it; how many meteors this actually produces is another matter. Given that the sky conditions have been less-than-optimal all week, I decided to wait until the moon set and give it a shot. And since this occurred after 1 AM this morning, I was up ‘late.’

long night exposure over Jordan Lake showing kayaker preparing
The sky was indeed quite clear, though this didn’t eradicate the light pollution that exists, and Jordan Lake is the closest area with semi-dark skies – this meant that for a short while, I was sharing the area with a kayaker getting ready to do some night fishing. What you’re seeing down at the bottom are the trails left by his red headlamp around his car, though on the horizon you can see the moving tops of some very distant thunderheads. More on this later.

long night exposure anchored on Polaris
This image shows Polaris, the North Star, at the center of all those arcs, with Ursa Major/Big Dipper off to the left. Note that this is nowhere near Aquarius, the radiant of this storm, but technically that was still below the horizon and anyway, the trees were blocking my view in that direction which is pretty light polluted anyway – I was aiming for the best display regions.

Most of my exposures were around ten minutes, because the lack of humidity meant less light scatter and I could get away with it, and while the camera was just sitting there exposing away, I was scanning around quite a bit, as well as doing some limited exploring until my flashlight battery died. I saw one distinct meteor, though a couple of glimmers out of the corner of my eye may, or may not, have been more. Naturally, the one that I saw was well outside the field of view of the camera, but it did seem to be originating from the direction of Aquarius – it was better than half the dome away though, so far that only a whole-sky image would reveal it seemed to come from there. It was a short and basic meteor anyway, what would have been just a line of light on the image – I’m after the brilliant fireballs, or at least a seriously long trail.

But then, during a short exposure at high ISO, I captured one. Woo hoo.

light streak suring long night exposure
Yeah, that’s it, that little scratch at top center. I need to find some way to note which way I’m aiming during such sessions, because it took a little while to determine that I was facing almost straight up – the bright star at upper right is Vega, the one at upper left is Arcturus, and that curve of stars near the streak is Corona Borealis. The zenith falls just slightly right of center between Arcturus and Vega. I ran Stellarium back after I got home to see if there were any visible satellites around that time and found none, so I was pretty confident that I snagged at least one meteor in-camera for all these attempts – notably, this was only an 18-second exposure.

Then I looked at some other frames.

long night exposure with intruding satellite
long night exposure showing intruding satellite
I left these at full-frame, so look closely at top center of both images. These were two minutes after the previous, now aimed almost due east, 18 and 9 second exposures, and the continuity of the trail (not to mention the even brightness throughout, no tapering or change in magnitude) indicates this is a satellite. With Stellarium, it’s very hard to compare orientation, but given the timing and directions, all three are likely the same satellite – I have no record of which, but with the inordinate number of new launches, this isn’t terribly surprising. This means, yet again, no meteors to show for the time spent chasing them. Sigh.

Although, that little cloudiness visible in both frames isn’t humidity, it’s actually the Milky Way, and I decided to pursue that a little better.

milky Way over Jordan Lake
I boosted ISO to 6400, the maximum of the camera, and fired off a few test exposures. This one has undergone a slight tweak to contrast (and some camera-noise reduction,) but is otherwise as shot. Man, I really got to get back out to the beach for more attempts without light pollution, because this isn’t half bad for all that. Scorpius is curling up from near the horizon towards the right, which means that the galactic center is sitting there somewhere above that one tree. This is just 9 seconds, so streaking was kept to a bare minimum.

Then I moved into the parking lot further away from the trees, and reoriented a little.

long night exposure of Milky Way
The tail of Scorpius is down there at lower right, and even at 18mm focal length, some of the clusters and nebulas along the Milky Way can be seen. Admittedly, this doesn’t hold a candle to a lot of the images out there, but then again, this has undergone no post-processing at all save for a slight contrast tweak – no multiple-frame stacking or extrapolation, no enhancements, no filters, and so on. These things are de rigueur for astronomy photos anymore, but horseshit as far as I’m concerned, because it’s all computer work – you’ll never see nor capture anything of the sort in-camera, and can only achieve them with specialized software and multiple frames. Imagine what the reaction would be if we did that for any other kind of photography.

Now, I missed a trick myself while out there, only thinking about it after I got back and saw the large amount of chromatic speckling within the ISO 6400 frames. The 7D has a long-exposure noise reduction option, but I’d tried it out and it takes as long, processing within the camera, as the original exposure did; this is obviously a hindrance with ten-minute exposures, especially when chasing meteors, because it freezes up the camera from any other use. But with these ISO 6400 images lasting no more than 20 seconds – that’s doable. I wish I’d thought of it while out there, but I hadn’t yet seen the end results either.

combined frames of two exposures showing mysterious dark spotI’m throwing this one down for giggles, because that dark spot has me curious. These were consecutive, 8 and 17 seconds with a couple of seconds between them, and I don’t know how that dark patch got in there. I initially suspected a spot from the earlier rains, shown only by the brightness of the exposure, but it appears in no other frames and I never touched the lens while out there. I think a bug landed on the lens for a few moments.

I mentioned the thunderheads earlier, and I was seeing little flashes from that approximate direction some time later, figuring them to be distant lightning. So I pulled the lightning tracker up on my smutphone and found that the only strikes were something like 350 kilometers away! So either these carry for a remarkable distance on clear nights, or the tracker doesn’t register cloud-to-cloud activity and thus wasn’t pegging a closer storm, which is fairly likely. It seemed to be in the right direction anyway.

There were also a handful of fireflies cruising around out there, but none of them were inclined to cross the field of view of the camera, which might have been cool. I’ve seen too little firefly activity to try and capture it in a night exposure, but one of these days it’ll happen.

I’d headed down there hoping that my luck would continue after the lightning, and I’d catch an image of a glorious bolide, but no dice this time. And I remind myself, typing this, that the idea of ‘jinxing’ myself by hoping is just as superstitious as thinking there’s such a thing as luck holding. Meteor storms just ain’t been panning out for me – but I’ll catch nothing by not trying, so…

The easiest yet

Al Denelsbeck

It’s been a day of severe storm threats, alternating rain and sun, and tornado watches, but after dinner, I heard thunder about the same time that I was getting lightning strike alerts, and checked the Real Time Lightning Map: lots of strikes south of my location, but what looked like increasing activity to the west. I figured I’d give it a shot, and grabbed the camera and tripod and hiked it over to the neighborhood pond, knowing I had little time to spare.

Naturally, I saw one brilliant strike as the shutter was closed, but I waited it out – which hardly gives the right impression, because I didn’t have long to wait.

lightning strike beyond pond
It was dusk, with a little light still left in the sky, so I was slowly lengthening my exposures from 12 to 30 seconds or so. I was rewarded with this strike, and this is full frame; we can go in a little closer with a tighter crop for better framing:

closer crop of same lightning image
You can see that the wind and the rain have already roughed up the surface of the pond and all reflections. This exposure gives a decent idea of what I could see without the lightning, and I was watching to see if any beavers might want to get into the shot, though they remained out of sight.

But I could feel the wind picking up and the rain getting stronger – not like a front, but like a cell, gusty and sporadic. And then the wind really started to pick up. I had my hand on the tripod steadying it for this next frame.

closer lightning strike over pond
Even as brief as it was, I got the impression it was significantly closer, which the thunder confirmed, and the wind was roaring now. Still not close – several kilometers off – but lightning strikes can be unpredictable and the storm was serious by now. This was the last frame (uncropped at 18mm focal length, by the way,) and I immediately packed it up and headed back, not sure if I’d overstayed my time and wouldn’t be soaked before I got home. As it was, I was a bit damp, but the downpour held off long enough. Meanwhile, the lightning that seemed to be heading right in for a window-rattler died out almost as soon as I got home.

So you know, it was just shy of five minutes between the first and last frames that I shot on this little attempt, a total of 12 frames, which makes it by far the most efficient storm outing yet, even when others have produced better images. I could have thrown a pizza in the oven before I left and been back to take it out on time.

Well, that is good news

Al Denelsbeck

There’s a bit of sarcasm in that title, on multiple levels perhaps, but let’s take it from the beginning.

Almost four years ago, I had a paragraph within a post (down after the page break, here) that commented on the present state of cosmological physics and my ‘gut reaction’ to it. In short: the universe is not only expanding, it’s accelerating, and to do this it needs something to make it accelerate, which has been dubbed, “Dark energy.” We actually have no idea what dark energy is or how it would manifest, but the evidence of the acceleration is there from multiple measurements and methods, so it remains as a placeholder.

The upshot of this is, it would mean that the universe is destined to expand forever, eventually matter becoming so dissipated that energy exchange cannot take place and is simply lost to the depths of space; even the electron orbits of individual atoms dies out and the universe undergoes a ‘heat death.’ This happens so far off in the future that it’s academic, long after our own planetary system is destroyed by the death of the sun, and long after all of the other stars in the universe have lived out their own lives and dwindled into nothing. The time frame that is expressed here is millions of times the current age of the universe, though a great deal of that time would be spent dark and cold anyway as stars got more distant and petered out.

I mentioned there that the whole concept bothered me, the idea that the universe had this massive one-way trip, incredible energy exchanges and galaxy formations and all that jazz, to just drift off and die out, all change coming to an end. It didn’t seem right to me, to the point that this is a theory that I figure has got to be wrong. The Big Bang was/is extremely cool (probably not the best adjective there,) and it ends like that? No, I reckoned that there was something that made it cyclical, some process or undiscovered law of physics that slowed and eventually reversed the expansion, likely back down to the singularity that existed immediately before the Big Bang, whereupon a new universe could start from there. Yet, I recognize that this was only emotional, the distaste over the cessation of change, that went against what I felt was logical, and if I was fully accepting of the evidence, that was the way the universe would end, like it or not.

And then, there’s this paper, which says, “Maybe not. In fact, the acceleration may already be dying down, the expansion may stop soon, and the universe may start to contract again” [I am paraphrasing a bit here, but not inaccurately.]

Immediately, a part deep inside of me exults, “Nailed it!” even though I had no theory of my own (not quite true, but it was decidedly half-ass) and can’t be said to have forwarded any stance on the matter. It just validated my ‘gut instincts,’ which even I will admit weren’t instincts of any kind but just an emotional desire to see things differently. And soon afterward, my skepticism started kicking in.

With any scientific paper that promotes a significant change to our current understanding, the very first bit is to ask, “Has this been vetted and/or replicated yet?” A lot of new papers extend ideas that, with a bit of research or the attempt to duplicate the results, turn out to be overblown or just outright incorrect. Some of them aren’t even ‘papers,’ per se, in that they haven’t been published in serious peer reviewed journals – too many internet articles promote these without any recognition of this. Yet this paper has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [PNAS], which ranks pretty decently. As for replication, well, there can’t be any, since the physics and math involved don’t, and cannot, show any avenue of testing. Given that however, the numbers fit with the observations, at least according to reviewers. There isn’t anything in here, to my knowledge, that distinctly overturns the present nonstop expansion view, it just proposes a different set of rules.

Which means it’s too soon to feel good about it, even if you’re so inclined. And we need to recognize that cosmological time frames are something else. The paper indicates that the acceleration may end within 65 million years, and the expansion itself within 100 million. In comparison to the 13.78 billion year age of the universe, this is like, “next week,” but for perspective, “we” (meaning our human ancestors) had recently achieved walking upright not quite four million years ago, while 65 million years ago was the beginning of the end for the dinosaurs – it’s not like we’re going to see something happen. Quite frankly, I think we’ll be lucky to see the next half-million years.

From my personal standpoint, I’m not going to even see the universe fifty years from now, so what happens after that is academic; why should I concern myself with dark energy or any ultimate fate? No matter what, it’s too far in the future to even conceive of. Liking or disliking any theory of what happens is pointless, from any perspective you care to name, but we’re weird like that; understanding our universe seems important, likely from badly misplaced evolutionary goads, and liking one concept over another is… what? I honestly don’t know, which is why this article has been on my mind the past couple of days, because I’m not even sure what it says about us. Or at least me.

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Another page break. Just for the sake of it, I’ll bring up that there’s another theory on the fate of the universe, one that I’d been unaware of until reading this paper (or the parts that I could understand, anyway, which wasn’t much.) In that, the vacuum of our universe has a positive energy state, and may be separated from a neutral or negative energy state vacuum elsewhere (they’re using “bubble” as a descriptor, though whether we’re inside or outside of it is unclear.) Eventually, the bubble wall will pass over/through us, ending expansion – but also us, since the “ultrarelativistic” properties will alter pretty much everything. With no warning that this would be coming. Sleep tight.

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