Last night I set my alarm so as not to miss the sunrise on
Twin Peaks. The fog over San Francisco
was low to the ground, and when I arrived on the north peak, the sun had just
popped over the horizon. I had located
my “eclipse” glasses from celestial events of the past – the transit of Venus
in 2012 and the solar eclipse of 2017 – and packed them together with
binoculars, a thermos of coffee, and the Monday NY Times in anticipation of the
transit of Mercury.
I was very excited, in fact overly optimistic. My binoculars were simply not up to the task
of locating the miniscule black dot that was Mercury crawling its way across the
sun. Fortunately, another person had
brought his homemade telescope to witness the event. After a bit of fussing about, he found the
spot in the scope, and soon a clutch of young MIT grads arrived for viewing, as
well as a bicyclist who had previously worked at the Exploratorium and just
happened to be passing by. It was a
little geek heaven overlooking our beautiful city, and it made me think that although
I am not much of a chatterer in most situations, when the topic is science, I’m
ready for conversation.
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