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San Francisco and the Bay Area as viewed from the Los Trancos Trail Foothills Park - Palo Alto, CA - June 29, 2002 ©2002 Jim Leftwich - All Rights Reserved

Yesterday I hiked the 7.5 mile Los Trancos Trail in Palo Alto's Foothills Park with my friend, Darek Przygoda. Darek's an electrical engineer and colleague of mine at Pacific Consultants. He and his wife and daughter are natives of Poland, and he's both an avid hiker and digital photographer.

The Los Trancos Trail is the longest in Foothills Park, and the photo linked above (click on the photo to see an enlarged version) is a composite of two that I took from the highest point in the trail.

The weather was very nice and clear yesterday, and we could clearly see the skyline of San Francisco, about forty miles to the north (it can be seen just below the horizon left of center).

Here's a beautiful panoramic QuickTime VR spinaround of the bench that's located at the far southern corner of the Los Trancos Trail, by Erik Goetze, whose incredible site "Virtual Parks" contains many such shots from around the Bay Area, California, and other areas in the western part of North America. Here's the meadow, where the Los Trancos Trail begins and nearby Boronda Lake.
- posted by JIMWICh on 6/30/2002 6:08:37 PM

Annular Solar Eclipse 6/10/2002 6:27pm Mountain View, CA

Today there was a annular solar eclipse visible just after 6:00pm on the West Coast. The annular eclipse peaked at around 6:23pm.

A number of us at the office went outside to experiment with various cards with pinholes. The highly polarized eclipsed sunlight shining through the pinholes onto a surface rendered a perfect shape of the moon covering approximately 60% of the sun. This map graphic of the annular eclipse shows the eclipse shapes for different locations in the United States.

It's important to never look directly at the sun, including during any eclipse, without the proper darkening filter, as it can permanently damage your eyes. One of the engineers however, brought out the disk from a floppy diskette. We cut it up and looked through double layers. The result was a very gorgeous red eclipse. I used this as a filter to take some shots with my digital camera as well.

Eclipse Shadows 6/10/2002 Mountain View, CA

This isn't the first, nor the most complete eclipse I've ever seen, but they're always very cool to experience. The most striking thing is just the light itself, and how the high polarization makes everything look very sharply focused. Today's partial solar eclipse didn't dim the sunlight nearly as much as some eclipses that I've experienced, but it was definitely noticeable. The second thing that's incredible are all the little eclipse-shaped crescents that sunlight makes as it shines through leaves to cast shadows onto walls and the ground. I managed to get a number of interesting photos of these strange shadows as they fell on the walls of our office building.

Eclipses are very fun to experience and I'll be looking forward to my next opportunity. Looks like we've got 'em all planned out for the next thousand years!
- posted by JIMWICh on 6/10/2002 9:15:49 PM

Expo '70 Sun Tower Osaka, Japan

Summer, my favorite season, grows closer every day. I'm listening to a lot of sun music these days and thinking of my favorite sun things.

And among the strangest and coolest large-scale structures ever erected was Japanese artist, Taro Okamoto's Sun Tower. Built to welcome the world to Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan, the delightfully mutant tower was very controversial.

Spending his earlier years in Paris, he became friends with Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and André Breton. Okamoto, who died in 1996 at the age of 84, took pleasure in shocking the conservative Japanese public. He was called by some "Japan's Picasso."

Okamoto would often appear on Japanese television commercials and game shows, shouting slogans such as "Art is an explosion!"

Taro Okamoto Sun Tower 1970

Five years before his death, he gave 352 pieces of his artwork to his hometown of Kawasaki, south of Tokyo. At the time this work was purported to be worth $385 million, and the city announced plans to build a museum for the collection. The plans were to build it in the city's preserved "green zone" which sent the local environmentalists up in arms. Opponents filed a lawsuit against the planned museum on behalf of the foxes, raccoons, dragonflies, and spiders whose habitat would be disturbed by the museum's construction. The lawsuit was dismissed, but one art critic who knew the eccentric and controversy-courting Okamoto remarked that, "...animals suing him -- he would have loved to see it!"

The Taro Okamoto Museum is now built and has just the perfect whimsical architecture. And I love the furniture on this page!

I first learned about the Sun Tower in the great Shonen Knife song, Tower of the Sun, from their album, "Brand New Knife." Shonen Knife has recorded a new album, "Heavy Songs" that's out now. Can't wait to get it!
- posted by JIMWICh on 5/26/2002 1:54:18 AM

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