Author: Jonathan Mack

I’m now a published academic author! I did the coding, analysis, and wrote the initial drafts of the resulting paper, and my research lead provided the original idea, guidance, and (re)wrote/edited the paper’s final drafts. My code is here; the final paper is On the Frequency of Multiple Galaxy Mergers in ΛCDM Cosmological Simulations. Enjoy!

April 8, 2024

The last US total solar eclipse had been in 2017, and I hadn’t traveled to its path of totality. (The closest area of totality from NYC was in North Carolina, and I was on nights, and didn’t want to take time off, so ended up seeing it from my apartment window.) It was neat, but since then I had read that a total eclipse is so much better than a partial one, and because I had never seen a total, and the next one in North America wasn’t until 2036, I decided to do what it took to see this one, scheduled for April 8, 2024. And since she’s very good at it, and loves doing so, Gretchen started travel planning; we began thinking about this in late 2023, as we knew travel and hotel reservations in the path of totality would fill up quickly.

The eclipse path of totality was set to go from Texas to New England, so we knew we’d have to travel to it. My stepfather and his wife, and my brother and his wife and child (8 years old, a perfect age for a first total eclipse) were already planning to watch the eclipse in Cleveland, so that was our preferred destination. There’s no point in traveling to an eclipse obscured by clouds, though, and after noting that Cleveland average cloud cover is around 50%, and that average cloud cover generally decreases as you move south, we wanted a backup location to Cleveland in case the weather looked like it might be cloudy there. Because it might be difficult to get transportation between an airport/hotel/eclipse viewing spot, Gretchen looked for backup locations with good airline service, and short distances between airport, hotel, and potential viewing location. We decided on Dallas, and for both it and Cleveland, chose hotels and viewing locations close to their respective airports.

We also had to contend with Gretchen and my work schedule; the eclipse, on April 8, 2024, was a Monday of my work week, and though I had taken that night’s shift off, I was still scheduled to be back at work on Tuesday night. Gretchen also took that Monday (and Tuesday) off, but needed to be back at work on Wednesday morning. We therefore ended up reserving flights leaving Sunday night, and returning Monday night, such that if the flight was canceled we still had Tuesday morning to get back to NYC in time.

And then, planning finally finished, we sat back and waited. Cleveland was still our first choice, but if it looked like the weather there wasn’t going to be good enough, we’d cancel our (refundable) reservations and go to Dallas. If it looked like the Cleveland weather would be sufficient, we’d cancel the (also refundable) Dallas reservations and go to Cleveland.

Two weeks out, we began scrutinizing the weather forecasts. The closer to the 8th we got, however, the more concerned we became; a large weather system was forecast to be moving through the Midwest at that time, such that *both* Dallas and Cleveland were looking to be clouded over. With three days to go, we made the call; in consultation with my brother and his family, we decided to cancel both sets of reservations and move east, where the weather was forecast to be better. After a flurry of research, we decided on a working farm near Erie, PA, within driving distance of all of us.

With two days to go, however, we became concerned about even the Erie forecast. My brother and his family decided to risk Erie, but the chance of cloudiness was too high for me. As eclipse watchers all along the Northeast corridor were having the same thoughts, we weren’t hopeful we’d be able to find accommodations in the path of totality further east, but after hours of refreshing pages, Gretchen managed to find an opening at a well-reviewed motel in Potsdam, NY.

By Sunday, though, even the north central New York weather forecast was iffy, so in another reservation coup, Gretchen found a short-term rental, this time near Burlington, VT. We drove there on Sunday, leaving New York at 7 am and arriving at 2 pm. The rental was in a beautiful location, right next to a lake, so we spent the evening walking around, then looking at the stars, many more of which were visible than in NYC.

On Monday morning, we checked the weather, and even in Burlington there was *still* forecast to be 20% cloud cover. After more hurried research, we found a park in Newport, VT that was hosting an eclipse party, so left for there at 9 am. It only took an hour to get there, but traffic was almost at a standstill when we did. After an hour of inching along in traffic, we found that the only reason it hadn’t stopped completely was that police were stationed at the park entrance, telling people it had been full for hours, and that they had to go elsewhere, with no advice on where a good place might be.

With three hours to go until the partial eclipse began, by now just hoping we could find any place at all at which we could stop, we ended up driving north from the park, as that was the direction that led to higher ground, potentially giving a better view. Around half an hour later, we came to a spot on top of a hill where cars were parked off the side of the road, and obvious eclipse-watchers had set up. It turned out the area was private property, but the owner was graciously allowing people to park and eclipse-watch there, as long as they cleaned up after themselves. And after months of planning, five location changes, and with only two hours to go, we couldn’t imagine a better offer.

The location itself would have been wonderful even without the pressure to find any place at all; to the north and west we could see for miles, in the latter case all the way to Canada. The sky itself was almost perfectly clear, and adjacent eclipse-watchers had even brought a solar filter-equipped telescope that we were able to look through.

At 2:15 pm the partial eclipse began, and we spent the next hour looking at the sun through our eclipse glasses, and taking pictures.

At 3:27 pm the full eclipse began, and all the time, effort, and stress to get to that point became worth it; the temperature plummeted, the sky darkened, the sounds of nature hushed, and the sun just…went out, only its ghostly corona differentiating it from the blackness of space. For the three minutes of totality we watched, hurriedly took pictures and video, and marveled.

(Aside from a compatible tripod and filter, we hadn’t brought any specialized photographic equipment; we assumed phone camera technology was quite advanced enough for our purposes. We were correct in our assumption, except that our default camera phone app could not correctly autofocus on the sun, so our initial pictures (and, alas, totality video) just showed a blob instead of a partially/fully eclipsed sun. Thankfully our phone filter came with an app that manually allowed us to adjust focus, so we were able to get the above, and many other good shots.)

At 3:30 totality ended, but we stayed put, partially because after all that we wanted to get as much eclipse as possible, and partially to give traffic a chance to die down.

The partial eclipse ended at 4:38, and only then did we pack up. After a snack pit stop, we hit the road, at 5 pm.

We had 15 hours until we needed to be anywhere (after we had made our initial reservations, Gretchen had been scheduled for an important work meeting at 8 am Tuesday morning in NYC), so we assumed we’d have plenty of time to get back. That assumption was…incorrect. It turned out that many, *many* people had, like us, come from NYC to northern NH/VT to see the eclipse, and, crucially, they were all trying to get back when we were. Our first stop was to charge the car, at a location 50 miles south of Newport. It took five hours to get there. Traffic crept along just consistently enough that one had to pay attention the entire time; Gretchen took first shift driving, so that’s what she did. For five hours. With no breaks.

When we finally got to the charger at 10:30 pm, we got another (ahem) shock; the longest charger line we’d ever seen. This location had twelve chargers, but there were at least fifty cars waiting to charge. The line of cars stretched down an access road, snaked multiple times through a grocery store parking lot, and ended just before the intersection leading out of the associated shopping center.

As Gretchen had finally let me switch out with her, it was me that crept us along this time, finally reaching a charger at 12:30 am. By 1:30 am we were charged and on our way. The last 259 miles home were up to me; it was my turn to drive, Gretchen had work in the morning so needed to nap instead of drive, and I didn’t have work until that night, so could sleep all day.

And…we got home in time. I assumed traffic would be backed up similar to the first five hours of our drive, but it had mostly died down by then; we really only started to hit traffic as I reached the edge of NYC, as rush hour was just beginning.

We arrived home just after 6 am. Gretchen had time to jump in the shower and make her meeting, to find…it had been canceled. I caught up on sleep and went to work. We found out later that *all* of our previously-considered locations (Dallas, Cleveland, Erie, Potsdam, Burlington) would have been at least partially acceptable; each had at least some time during totality that clouds didn’t obscure the sun. And none were perfect; all locations (even Newport where we ended up) had at least a very high, thin cloud layer during totality.

But. We made it, it was very much worth it, and I’m going to do my best to make sure it’s a more-than-once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Attached is the Problem Report (Test-Driven Development of a Performance-critical Database Record-tree Balancing Application) I wrote for my Master’s in Computer Science. (I’m still trying to figure out why it took 12 years to upload it…) In any case, enjoy!

At my current base, I offered to write a monthly “Ask an Engineer” column, where base clinicians write in with questions on helicopter design and engineering, and I answer them. This is my first column:

Why do helicopter pilots sit on the right, while airplane pilots sit on the left?

The short answer is because that’s what pilots are already used to, and any new aircraft are designed to fit current pilot preferences. That begs the question, though: how did each tradition get started, and more importantly, why are they different between helicopters and airplanes? There’s no generally accepted single answer in either case, but a combination of the following is most likely:

Modern airplane design conventions first appeared in the 1920’s and 30’s. During that time, most airplanes were powered by large nose-mounted single engines and propellers. Most engines at the time rotated such that their torque made it difficult to turn the airplane to the right on the ground, which meant that pilots preferred to make ground taxi turns to the left. Also, most airplanes during this time had tailwheels, and sat (and taxied) nose-high. Pilots therefore preferred (so airplane manufacturers designed) airplanes in which pilots sat on the left, so they could see best in the direction they were most likely to turn on the ground.

There were aerial navigation reasons for pilots to prefer sitting on the left side, as well. Navigation at that time was mostly done by flying between visual ground checkpoints (bonfires, in the early days!), and it was convention for pilots to fly on the right side of those checkpoints, so as to stay clear of pilots using the same ones going the opposite direction. Most airport traffic patterns utilized left turns, as well. Flying on the left side, then, give the airplane pilot the best field of view to look for other air traffic near checkpoints and airports.

Helicopters became commercially viable later, in the 1940’s, and that’s when their design conventions began to solidify. The first mass-produced helicopter was the Sikorksy R4. It had two seats, and was originally designed to be flown from the left seat, perhaps to match already-established airplane design conventions. The test pilots for the aircraft were its first instructors, and mostly flew it from the left seat, and therefore their trainees mostly all learned to fly it from the right. The test/instructor pilots trained many more pilots than they themselves numbered, so the preference among early helicopter pilots (around which, again, the manufacturers designed) was to sit on the right.

Another potential reason for the start of the tradition was the location of the helicopter’s controls. In order to save weight and reduce complexity, early two-pilot helicopters like the R4 had only one collective control, in between the pilots. Most pilots are right handed, and preferred the control that required more finesse (so the cyclic control) to be manipulated by their dominant hand, which meant that they preferred to sit on the right.

The previous are the most likely reasons why pilots sit where they do now, but there are some interesting modern exceptions to this convention. The most common of these is the Airbus H130 (previously Eurocopter EC130), in which the pilot sits on the left. The reason for this is that, though it’s widely used in helicopter EMS these days, the H130 was originally designed as a tour helicopter. Eurocopter extensively solicited tour operator input during the design process, and one of the things the operators told them was that in helicopters then used for tours (predominantly the AS350 AStar and B206 JetRanger/LongRanger), some front-seat passengers, attempting to enter the aircraft, would grab anything that looked like it might be useful in pulling themselves into the helicopter, including the collective! Grabbing onto it while getting inside raised the collective, causing some inadvertent (near-) takeoffs, and the operators wanted to eliminate this risk. Eurocopter felt the best solution to this problem was to move the pilot seat to the left side of the aircraft, where the collective would be near the pilot door, as opposed to between the pilot and front seat passenger. This design change worked well for tour operators, and pilots transitioning between left- and right-seat helicopters have not found it difficult to do so, so we may see even more left-seat piloted helicopters in the future.