A Rock Scramble Nighthawk

+ Solar Observations

Vol. 162, July 22nd, 2025 Published a day early online

If you’d prefer an audio version of this post, dig this.

And it’s on SoundCloud, too.

Bearfence & The Sky

The storm muttered vague threats, still a mile out, trudging up from the south. The air hung still and stifling, silent except for the bumblebees. They buzzed among the alpine wildflowers, intent on their work. I huffed up the grade, listening to them, and distant thunder.

The sky hung low and dark over the crest of the mountain. Prudence said to turn back, but that never was a strong suit of mine, so on I went, the soft pad of worn out shoes breaking the calm. Nettles and ferns crowded the path, and look! A tiger lily, woodland queen crowned orange.

The trail ducked along the foot of a mighty rock, then up, up, straight to the sky. I clung to the greenstone with sweaty hands and leaned to the left.

It’s easy to forget a fear of heights when I live in the valley, and lapse into the noise of the world. But the mountain has rules, and craggy trees, and shaggy flowers visited by ten thousand bees. This beauty hurts as it breaks away the shell of that valley theology, where I think I’m close to the answers. I struggled up, up, past an ancient pine, inching along the blades of rock, and looked–everywhere: the blue west, the foggy east, and into the distance that looks back.

Then I climbed down Bearfence. The rain held off.

Howdy, Thor: The blue blazed trail on Bearfence climbs straight to the sky. Call it the “Ben Franklin Scramble”. Lightning clouds gather.

Carol’s Appalachian Word of the Week

Might should: “I might should take Ma to the doctor today after all.”

Happy Birthday Bessel (1784)

This German astronomer was the first to measure the distance to a star not the Sun.

Quote for the Day

“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

–John Adams, letter to John Quincy Adams

Symphony of the Week

Beethoven’s 6th Captures the Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the countryside no matter where you are. Give it a spin!

Write to Us!

The Nighthawk is a new old-fashioned way to connect, published weekly. You’re invited to write back, or just enjoy reading. Let’s have some fun! It’s a social paper! Send stories, etc to: PO Box 783, Rustburg, VA 24588 or Joshurban@protonmail.com

Letters from Josh

(A weekly update from Josh Urban’s adventures on the farm and in the city. #242)

Appearing in the Altavista Journal, etc.: Staring at the Sun

Howdy, folks, and welcome back to the show! It looked like the 3 ball: red, angry, seething, vast–a nuclear reactor. The broiler of July. The Sun. “Well there’s your problem” I muttered, sweating, leaning into the eyepiece of a special telescope. A cloud drifted in front of it, black smoke, extra fiery.

Kids, don’t try this at home. You need a safe, filtered telescope. Otherwise you’ll be way worse off than Ralphie in A Christmas Story. You’ll burn your eye out. Then we’ll all be sorry.

I’ve been doing solar astronomy for years. Sidewalk viewing is always fun, especially with tourists. “Want to look at the Sun through a telescope?” I’d ask. “Perfectly safe. I’m holding up two fingers, right?” while extending a full hand. Oh, the alarm on their faces.

Joking aside, with proper equipment, it is safe to take a look. The most common way is with a special dark tinted filter on the front of a regular telescope.

“It looks like a moldy orange” someone said. “What are those specks?” Astronomers need to up their naming game. They’re called, err...sunspots, and they do look like mold on an orange. “Oh, that’s it?” Boring–until you realize each speck is as big as our planet. And what is a sunspot? Let’s switch over to the other telescope. I’ve got a few.

This sleek gold beauty is called a Hydrogen Alpha scope, and besides that dark glass that keeps our eye in one piece, it’s got a special filter that only lets through a little bit of red light–the 656 nanometer band, to geek out. Please don’t take my lunch money.

We can look at the Sun’s chromosphere, a sort of an atmosphere for Sol. It’s where we see great twisting, looping prominences. I’ve mistakenly called them solar flares. Think of those red arches in Utah, but big enough for our planet to fly through. Thing is, the Sun is almost 93 million miles away, so from here, these giant structures look like lint on the Sun. The scale of these things, man. But what are those?

Deep in the heart of the Sun, temperatures and pressures are so high, that electrons are stripped away from protons. The particle soup is called plasma, and it’s boiling and moving around in great cells thousands of miles across. As the streams of plasma boil up, they create magnetic fields around them (moving charged particles and all that good stuff). They emerge from the surface, then above in a great arch, returning back thousands of miles away. It’s a big place. The Sun is 865,000 miles in diameter.

Think of the biggest shoelace ever, going from the left side of your shoe, back to your right. Now, sometimes, like shoelaces, the underlying magnetic field in the prominence gets twisted and knotted at the surface of the Sun. Plasma flowing along this arch falls back down, gets stuck at the “knot”, and can’t flow back “underground”. It sits on the surface, and cools slightly. When we look through the telescope, the cooler areas (as big as Earth) look dark against the hotter, brighter surface. That’s what a sunspot is.

It’s the best moldy orange ever, and your friendly local nuclear reactor. No wonder July is a bit toasty. Drop me a line if you’d like to see for yourself.

–Josh