Over the past few years, I’ve become interested in land conservation, so I was thrilled to hear the news recently that the 350-acre property in Spencer known as the Sibley-Warner Farm had been purchased from the developer through the efforts of three organizations, the Common Ground Land Trust, Mass Audubon, and the Greater Worcester Land Trust.  The asking price was almost three million dollars, so you know that the efforts to raise this amount were nothing short of heroic.

This morning, a group of about 20 of us gathered at 131 Greenville Street at 10 am for a 2-hour guided walk through part of the property.  After the searing heat of the past few days, the cloudy morning was a welcome change, though we knew we would not see a lot of butterflies, insofar as these insects prefer full sun.  At least we figured that the ticks would not be out in full force either!

The property features diverse landscapes, including fields and forests.  We started out walking through the fields, which are now quite overgrown, often with invasives such as multiflora rose.  The land has not been cared for in a while, so we literally bushwhacked our way through vegetation which grew up over our heads.  We listened for birds, and kept an eye out for other signs of wildlife.  We did see signs of deer, including droppings and patches of flattened grass where a small group would bed down for the night.  Here are a few of the plant and animal species we noted:

• praying mantis
• indigo bunting
• cedar waxwing
• barn swallow
• common wood nymph
• pearl crescent
• black raspberry
• doll’s eye
• false Solomon’s seal
• hemlock
• Christmas fern
• leather fern
• wild basil

I was disturbed to note that most of the hemlock trees we saw are infested with the woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae).  I know that foresters are working on this issue, but I’m not sure how much progress has been made.

On our walk, we first climbed the hill, trudging upwards east from Greenville Street, then gradually turned north, scrambled over a horse jump, and then pushed our way through tall grass to join the yellow-blazed Mid-State Trail.  Once we were on the trail, we hiked through forest, turning west and then south, and soon found ourselves back at the road, a few hundred yards from where we started out.

A management plan for the property is now being developed, and many hours of volunteer effort are needed to polish this newly-preserved gem in the heart of the Commonwealth.  Come join us!

I don’t remember how I first heard about it — perhaps through my Twitter feed — but a couple of weeks ago I resolved to watch the Transit of Venus, though I wasn’t sure how to go about it.  Then a few days ago I saw a news brief on the UMass website announcing that there would be a viewing of the transit at the UMass Sunwheel, sponsored by the Department of Astronomy.  I’m there, I said to myself.

All day today I watched the sky anxiously.  It remained drizzly and cloudy, so I began to think that we were out of luck.  But the rain had stopped by 5 pm when I usually leave work, so I drove out to the Sunwheel, which is just behind the stadium.  At 5:30, Professor Stephen Schneider spoke to the crowd about the Sunwheel itself, and asked us to hang around to see if the clouds would clear.

A number of ancient cultures built stone structures to serve calendrical functions, Professor Schneider explained, because back in those days, agricultural societies depended on the sun’s position to indicate to them when to begin planting crops.  Now about ten years old, the UMass Sunwheel was designed to demonstrate how these stone calendars worked.  The first tall standing stones to be placed in the Sunwheel indicate the cardinal directions: north, south, east, west.  On the spring and fall equinoxes, the sun rises over the East stone and sets over the West.  In the night sky, Polaris appears directly above the North stone; its angle above the horizon should be around 42 degrees, because Amherst is at latitude 42 degrees.  Due to our latitude, at the equinoxes, the sun rises no higher in the sky than 48 degrees.  Because the Earth tilts 23.5 degrees on its axis, the sun rises to only 24.5 degrees at the winter solstice, and climbs to 71.5 degrees at the summer solstice.  In the northern hemisphere, at noon on the solstices, shadows fall to the north.

Now then: Venus.  It is our sister planet, in a sense, and also tilts on its axis as it orbits the sun.  However, Earth’s orbit and Venus’ orbit are not tilted at the same angle, so the alignment of their orbits happens twice in eight years, every hundred years or so (the previous transit occurred in 2004).  In the nineteenth century, transits occurred in 1874 and 1882, and the next won’t be until 2117!  Though the transit is not at all spectacular like an eclipse, its rarity makes it a special astronomical event.

Professor Schneider reminded us that as recently as the eighteenth century, the size of the solar system could not be accurately calculated:  people didn’t really know how big the sun or the planets were, or how far away they were from each other.  In 1716, the astronomer Edmund Halley suggested that more accurate numbers could be obtained by measuring the transit of Venus; that is, from widely-spaced locations on Earth, observers could time the transit across the sun and by triangulation derive the distances to Venus and to the sun.  In 1761, the Americans Mason and Dixon, they of Mason-Dixon Line fame, travelled to South Africa to participate in the collaborative scientific effort to take accurate measurements.  The 1769 transit was also successfully observed from many locations worldwide.

By 5:50, the western sky was clearing, and by 6, the sun was actually visible!  The crowd had swelled to over 50 people by then, and the excitement was palpable.  The two telescopes, both with filters that enabled safe viewing, were set up and trained on the sun.  At 6:04 I started looking through the special glasses that were provided for us, but I could only see the sun as a perfectly round orange circle.  I knew that Venus would appear as a very small black dot, so I figured that my naked eyes weren’t good enough to see it.  So I got in line for one of the telescopes, and after only a few minutes, it was my turn.  So I looked through the eyepiece, and there it was! a little black dot at the left and bottom of the solar disk.

What a thrill it was to have this once-in-a-lifetime experience.