When I was eight or nine, I traveled with my father up into the rarefied air of the Sacramento Mountains of Southern New Mexico. Getting there was long, hot and complicated. Our VW van pushed up over the mountain passes as thunderheads rolled in from the west, plum and steel-gray, and the sky flashed and shuddered under the monsoonal effects of the late-summer deserts. I avoided touching the metal surfaces of the VW van as my father, a professor of electrical engineering, explained how the lighting, were it to hit the car, would likely melt the tires and travel through the shell of the van and into the ground below.

We were in search of another kind of lightning, however, as we passed through the Border Patrol check-point near White Sands and ascended into the Ponderosa Pines of the high, western mountains. The van chugged along but kept ascending and any limitations it may have had were lost on my youthful mind as the smell of pine needles and the cooler air rolled in through the open windows until we finally slowed to a crunching stop in a gravel lot near a couple of unimpressive shacks. We were above the clouds, with just the tops of the cumulonimbus visible to the south and west.

I knew that I was at a place called Sunspot and that there were telescopes there that were used to look at the sun. It was an act of technological disregard of the countless warnings I had received about looking at the sun as a child, including when my father brought home dense smoked filters from the Naval Observatory in Washington DC when I was four to let us watch a full solar eclipse.… Read the rest