Cyprus Swamps

Figure 1 – Cyprus Swamp – Corkscrew Sanctuary, Naples, Florida (c) DE Wolf 2024 –

Everglade grasses, mangrove swamps, and beaches – the other great natural environment in Southwest Florida is the Cedar Swamps – there are shades of youthful imaginings. It is all personified by Georgia’s great Okefenokee Swamp. We visited two of these sites: the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Naples, Florida and the Six Mile Cypress Slough Sanctuary in Fort Myers. A slough is a place of deep muck and mire, i.e. a swamp. And for nature lovers they are deeply contemplative and moving places. And also I should point out that as a Northeastern photographer it is a learning experience. If you spot something worth photographing along the waters edge, you learn that your first though should not be to approach it without abandon. As far as I can tell alligators are giant muscles with a lot of teeth.

Cyprus swamps live up to expectation. Giant trees with submerged roots. And speaking of roots there are the abstract and mysterious Cyprus knees that reach up from the water. I’d like to say that wildlife abounds. But the abundance here is less than hoped for and a siren call of ecological ruin.

Figure 3 – Cyprus Knees – Corkscrew Sanctuary, Naples, Florida (c) DE Wolf 2024

Everglades

Figure 1 – The Florida Everglades, (c) DE Wolf 2024

Back in January TC and I spent a month exploring Southwest Florida. Early on in the trip we went on a “Safari” to the Florida Everglades. A feature of the “adventure” was a trip on an air-boat through the Everglades National Park. Such air-boats are a classic Florida attraction, a thing of the 1950’s-1960’s, where a boat with an aircraft engine tears at top speed through the swamp. The goal appears to be both to terrify every animal present and to break the backs of every patron. I cannot rate it eco-friendly, and at worst it is the opposite.

However, at one point the pilot shut off the engine, and we quietly floated among the grasses on the edge of the lake, watched without comment by a nearby turkey vulture. There was an insistent breeze and ominous clouds loured in the sky above us. There is something poignant about not seeing any sign of humanity. Years ago I used to position myself just so in the Ithaca gorges to achieve the precise effect.

Here it came easily, and I was reminded of the now out-of-date dinosaur murals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. These I loved so much as a child. In particular was the brontosaurus, his weight too cumbersome to be supported without the assistance of water.

Here was his swamp. I kept expecting to see him peer down at me while munching on a great wad of grass – a scene not quite right. – grandeur now lost to silicon graphics. Pausing there in the everglades was something magical. There was a lesson to be learned in the end – one of both belonging and being alien – brontosaurus or not.

Ivy

Figure 1 – Libe Slope October 2023, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (c) DE Wolf 2024

So I am remembering. Those of you who have seen the movie “Oppenheimer,” were introduced, in a small sense, to the heady world of American Physics in the 1930’s and 40’s. I realized as I watched that movie that had I been born a generation earlier the world depicted in the film would in all likelihood have been my world. The people depicted in that film were our heroes and teachers a generation later. Hans Bethe, who features prominently was my Professor of Electrodynamics at Cornell in the 1970’s.

This past October, I had the opportunity to wander around on campus again. Cornell, for those of us who went there, was a magical place – maybe even more so for graduate students because it was after all part of someone else’s childhood. Cornell is an amazing place in October, when it is filled with autumn color. Back then the entirety of the Engineering Quad was ablaze with red ivies, long since removed because they were damaging the stone and brick.

So I wandered around in nostagia-land taking in the colors, and I came across the scene of Figure 1 overlooking Libe Slope and in the distance the canal to Lake Cayuga. Like I said yesterday, my heart and mind were filled with lasting memories. Every place had a memory.

Heading towards summer

Figure 1 – July, Halibut Point State Park, Rockport, MA (c) DE Wolf 2024

After weeks of rain and even snow I was greeted this morning to an absolutely Homeric rosey fingered dawn. It made me thinks of what the coming months would bring and of a photograph that I took last July at Halibut Point in Rockport, MA. What is more summer than black-eyed Susies? So for me this photograph was the distilled essence of all my summers: the heat, the brilliant sunlight, the flowers, and the birds. Black-eyed Susies are a childhood flower. They are almost personified.

I remember vividly taking this photograph and that contributes a tripartite substance to the image. You take the image and in the moment it says “summer” to you. You are flooded with memories of all the summers of your life. It is quintessentially summer. And finally you carry around with you,”forever,” the memory of the taking of the image.

I think that in general when you take a photograph that you are “happy with,” the memory of the taking, the creative act and what it meant to you stays with you. Such is the magic of photography.

Figure 2 – Black-eyed Suzies (c) DE Wolf 2024

Among the infinities

Greetings from Hati and Skoll!

I have been struggling to bring Hati and Skoll back on line. It has been a while and these days there’s always a battle with “customer support” somewhere along the road – well-intentioned and kind people, but always ready to take you off your path. I feel a bit like I am on a mythic trip through the Egyptian underworld! Yet here, in the end I am here, My photographic soul has been weighed by a multitasking Anubis processing many souls at once. I am a kind of modern Jedermann, where few, if any know what I am talking about.

Really observant readers will note the reversion here to an earlier and simpler WordPress webtheme. I’m not sure if I don’t prefer it.

My photographic journey, of late, has been busy exploring infinities: the infinity of space through robot telescopes and the seeming infinity of biodiversity in Southern Florida. I am going to try and catch-up; so apologize for photographs out of time and context. These infinities are what I have called before, “The Enormity.” They represent what is ultimately the blessing of a receptive life on Earth. It is the ever-present dichotomy of how small and how large we are.

So today an image I took this week on an 200 mm Skygems Observatories Telescope in Namibia, a wide-field image that includes both the Flame (NGC 2024) and the Horsehead Nebulae (Barnard 33). I have photographed both of these with a small telescope in suburban Boston skies – heavily light polluted, what’s referred to as Bortle 5.7. Here they are under the skies that primitive man took for granted. I think this is from a wonderful Bortle 1. Like the demise of biodiversity, we have every so slowly, but consistently, brought this terrible light pollution upon ourselves.

Figure 1 – The Flame and Horsehead Nebulae, Skygems Observatories, Namibia, Africa (c) DE Wolf 2024.

Bed of blubber

First full day of summer. I think it’s time to think of a nap and what better place than one soft and warm. So I an reminded of the photograph that I took at La Jolla cove this past January of a sea lion napping on a bed of blubber, trying not to itch her whiskers, and quite content to listen to the waves and watch the tourists with a sleepy eye.

Figure 1 – Bed of blubber, California sea lion. (c) DE Wolf 2023

“Lost Forever in the Mists of the Summer Sea.”

Today is the Summer Solstice. A year ago I lured TC out on Rockport’s Old Granite Pier to watch the Summer Solstice Sunrise (Figure 1). The solstice has always appealed to me. It emphasizes the fact that since the beginning of human time people have been looking up searching for something, searching for meaning. It represents the dichotomy of human experience, the scientific and the spiritual.

Figure 1 – Summer Solstice Sunrise, 2022 (c) DE Wolf 2023

“And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury, Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the Summer Sea.”

Marion Zimmer Bradley – The Mists of Avalon

Encounters with robots – Part 2 Rumpole

Figure 1 -Messier 81, Bode’s Nebula (c) DE Wolf 2023

Figure 1 is a photograph that I took of Messier 81, Bode’s Nebula two nights ago using iTelescope T24, a 0.61-m f/6.5 reflector, in Auberry, California. It is another example of encounters with robotic eyes. Bodes’s Nebula is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Messier 81 was first discovered by Johann Elert Bode on 31 December 1774; Bode being famous for Titus-Bode’s Law of planetary distances.

At first, I was a bit put off by the lack of sharpness in this image. Artistically it look like a little fuzzy pancake. But then I realized that I had looked at M81 myself with my own telescope the previous night, and that is exactly what it looks like. The appeal lies in the subtle color, in the incredible dynamic range between the galactic core and the outer band; it floats; it is gorgeously ethereal. M81’s core contains a black hole with the mass of 70 million Suns and 15 times the mass of the black hole at the center of our own Milk Way galaxy. Breath taking!

But moving from the sublime to the more mundane, what I really want to talk about today is my Roomba by iRobot. It cleans my house by command either using an app on my cellphone or using Alexa by voice command. My house has never been so clean! Every day I send it to a different room. It is constantly updating its map of my house. Yes, true learning! So, I think a true robotic encounter.

You are encouraged to name your Roomba. Mine is Rumpole. And everyday as I watch him systematically lumber to his task. I think of Leo McKern, who played this character on television.

But really, I tend to be reminded of the nineteen-sixties futuristic TV series “The Jetsons and in particular Rosie the Robot, the Jetson family’s XB-500 series robotic maid. Rosie came complete with a little frilly French maids outfit. Like Rumpole, she was forever cleaning.

Futuristic fiction always bears the flavor of modern times. The Jetsons takes place in a temporarily displaced 1960’s. It carries forward all the prejudices and quirks of the 60’s. Worse, of course, is Star Trek. Did we truly hope that the future would be just as sexist as the then present? Rosie is a human-like machine that pushes a vacuum around. Makes no sense from an engineering perspective. Rumpole takes a deep dive under the couch, in the search of alien dust bunnies. Indeed, on his first mission in my bedroom, he had an encounter with a paper towel under my bed. Rumpole growled a bit and spit it out. The paper towel did not fare as well.

Encounters with robots- Part I

Figure 1 – Messier 51 taken with the iTelescope.net T18 12″ telescope (c) DE Wolf 2023

To people of my generation, the concept of robots began first with Robby the Robot Toy of the 1950’s and more so with the stories of Isaac Asimov, and of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, science fiction at its height. We dreamed of a world of robots and androids and pondered weighty issues such as whether they would be programmed with a prime directive “to bring no harm to humans” and whether we would be so kind in return.

Well, fiction becomes truth! For decades robots built our automobiles, farmed our farms, baked and packaged cookies for us. But they were huge ungainly contraptions, and there was no sense that theycould be interacted with directly. Well, wake up Rip van Winkle! I find that I have come to consciousness in 2023 and encounter robots everywhere. They have crept up on us, and they now surround us, not necessarily in a threatening way but as our helpers. And, indeed, the word “consciousness” rings true. We have come to grapple with the question of their sentience and awareness, even if we like to tuck it away somewhere safe.

When I was a teenager I was very “into” amateur astronomy. Back then if you wanted to see something with your telescope, a star, planet, or galaxy say, you pulled out your Norton’s Star Atlas and carefully “star hopped” from some bright star following the map field by field until if you were lucky found the desired object. Recently, telescopes have evolved with various complex auto-alignment systems. Well, I will have to admit that with age crawling around in various awkward positions to look under and over my telescope to get it aligned, more often than not defeated me. It was all very frustrating! Recently I added the Celestron StarSense Autoalignment System to my telescope. It is a little robot that you tell to align my scope and it does. Then you tell it what you want to look at and it goes there and tracks the object. Purists may argue that this is very algorithmic and not true artificial intelligence. But it is truly marvelous, arguably the best thing ever, and it is robotics at its very best, since it takes a difficult task for humans adn makes it easy and trivial. That in the end is what robotics is all about. Farming the Earth and building automobiles is one thing, aligning my telescope quite another! I call my telescope Celeste. My telescope now is smart enough to have a name if not a soul.

Still there is the problem that I would like to have Celeste high on a mountain top and I would like her to have a larger aperture so that I could take marvelous astrophotographs. Enter the age of robotic eyes, telescopes that you can control remotely, all located in distant sites perfect for astrophotography – places like Nerpio, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. I took Figure 1 of Messier 51, the Great Whirlpool Nebula using a 12 inch robotic telescope (T18) on the iTelescope network. I have also used robotic telescopes on the Skygems Remote Observatories network. The proposition is a simple one. You control the telescope, either in real time or on a schedule, and the telescope takes the image. Then you download and image process it on your home computer. These encounters with robotic eyes are truly wonderful and enriching.

Purists will argue that this is not the same as taking the image yourself on your own telescope. I feel about this the same way that I feel about the argument that film-based analogue photograph is purer and better than digital photography. In fact, our cameras have become robots and through the combination of automatic analysis of the scene and high dynamic range digital imaging sensors have freed us of cumbersome analysis of the image, freed us to be artists. So often I hear “show me the camera’s raw image,” as if that were somehow truer and purer. I personally always shoot in raw, but I process, true to the point made by Ansel Adams that “You do’nt take a photograph. You make it.”

So three robots enriching my life anyway: the Celestron StarSense Autoalign, robotic telescopes, and my digital camera. I am truly Rip van Winkle, awakening in a Brave New World. To paraphrase Miranda in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,”

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous [machinekind] is! O brave new world
That has such [robots] in’t!