Hill Slug Chronicles: Oldwick, Neowise

Fox Hill Road, Tewksbury, NJ

18 July 2020

I: Oldwick

By this time last year, I'd led 13 rides. So far this year I've led 8. If I get to 10 I earn myself yet another ill-fitting ride leader jersey. I've been collecting them since 2003, the first year I led 10 rides. I use them mostly for commuting because most of them are too big or too small, and the ones that fit my tank-shaped torso cut off the circulation in my biceps. Cyclists aren't supposed to lift weights. Or have boobs. Or body fat. Whatever. Two more rides and I'll have another one to fight with.

I wanted to go to Oldwick, and checked online to make sure the general store was open. The club's Covid-19 rules allow us to restrict the number of registrants to 10 or less. I picked 8 so that I could count and pedal at the same time.

The entire Slug contingent signed up, filling 6 slots. Madhu jumped in. Pete said he was bringing his daughter, but he hadn't registered her, so I registered myself to fill her slot. That made 9 of us in all, which is a lot for a Hill Slug ride.

The weather threatened to be beastly hot, so I cut five miles off the route, leaving us the option to put them back in if we felt sufficiently spunky.

We interrupt this blog post to toss in a few unblogged photos from last week:

D&R Canal at Blackwells Mills

Somewhere in Hillsborough or Montgomery

(it all looks the same to me out there, no matter

how many times Jim pulls us through)

Somewhere in Hillsborough or Montgomery

So anyway:

I feel obligated to stop at Thor Solberg Airport if Tom is on the ride. We didn't stay long. It was already hot.

Whenever I'm headed north of Route 22, I take Mill Road. Mill and Rockaway are mandatory.

Jim knows this, and he knows to sing "Cows in the Water" (think Deep Purple) even if they're not in the water at the moment. Sometimes they are.

Jim stopped to look at them too.

Hill and Dale Road is halfway up Rockaway. My shortened route had us taking it to Route 517 down to the general store. Hill and Dale is a pretty road, worth showing off to Madhu and Sarah. When we got there, though, the consensus was that we all had energy for the longer route, which would take us all the way up Rockaway, up the Sawmill hill in the shade, across Route 517, and down Fox Hill for an easterly view of the Watchung Mountains.

I've never stopped on the steepest parts of the descent before. It wasn't easy keeping my bike upright as I took pictures.

There were cars in the parking lot of the Oldwick General store, which was confusing, because it was closed for renovation. The dry cleaners is still open, and some of the other cars were there for the construction work.

The tables, chairs, and bike rack were still out, and the ceiling fan in the breezeway by the back door was creaking along. So we stopped and ate what we'd brought with us, which is a thing we do now that we can never be sure about what's open and what's not.

Fortunately, the Whitehouse General Store, 6 miles later, was open. We raided their bottled water supply. There were already a few other cyclists there, one of whom Jim knew. I didn't recognize him at first, but he remembered me, and then I remembered that I'd bought Beaker's first set of wheels from him. I remembered him describing in great detail how he coasts his chain in paraffin wax. Jim, so taken by the idea, has been doing it ever since.

Aside from the Rockaway and Sawmill ascents, there aren't any sustained climbs along this route, which is why I chose it for a day like today. That having been said, the incessant rollers take a toll, the elevation gain piles up, and the last ten miles are a pain in the ass no matter which roads I choose.

Madhu and I were pretty well spent when we got back to the parking lot. An orb web, probably a week old by now, by the rear window of my car, cheered us up. Turns out we both like spiders.

II: NEOWISE

Tom likes taking pictures of astronomical phenomena like eclipses and comets. He'd already been out once this week to find the comet NEOWISE. He invited us to join him in Conover Field, near Mercer County Park, at 9:30 p.m., to find the comet again. It wouldn't be as bright as it had been earlier in the week, but he thought we'd have a reasonable chance of seeing it.

The sun had just set when I got there. Tom lent me a spare tripod. I'd never used a tripod before. It made me feel as if I looked like I knew what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing.

Tom told me to set my exposure for 15 seconds, so I did, and mucked about with the sunset for practice.

Jack H and Dorothy were there with a telescope. Ricky and Cheryl arrived soon after. We were all wearing masks and staying six feet apart from each other. More people were driving in. "Everybody's here to see the comet," Tom said.

It wasn't dark enough to see anything with our naked eyes. I'd forgotten to bring binoculars. Tom lent me his (I made sure to wipe them down with alcohol before handing them back, because that's what we all do now). He had a telescope too.

I took some shots at 15 seconds just to get the camera positioned correctly. It took a while before Tom's explanation of where the comet would be made sense. We had to find the lowest star in the Big Dipper, then look down toward the horizon, just above the cloud line, above the two poles across the road.

Only when I got home and started messing around with cropping and color corrections did I realize that I'd captured the comet early. It's the fainter, bluish dot above the two stars. It was 9:23 p.m.

Between then and 9:50 we busied ourselves with trying to get pictures and trying to see the comet with only our eyes. The trick was not to look directly at it, but at one of the lower stars. And to screw around with the pictures later.

Professional quality they're not, but hey, I've never used a tripod before, and this is my first comet as a grownup.

At 9:54 we saw the space station. We all thought it was an airplane at first. Tom corrected us. It was too far up, too big, and there were no flashing lights. It was a bright line gliding over the horizon from west to east. I stopped taking pictures so that I could follow it until it disappeared. Only when I got home did I find out I'd captured it in a couple of photos.

The comet, very faint, is in the upper left and the space station, a blurry streak, is lower right.

Here, the Big Dipper is upper left, the comet near the horizon beneath it, and the space station off to the lower right:

By 10:12, NEOWISE was too faint to see. Trying to bring it out, I had fun with the "auto adjust colors" feature in my image processing software.

We turned our cameras around to look at Jupiter (the bright star on the right) and Saturn (the one on the left).

Tom adjusted his telescope so that we could see all four of Jupiter's moons, and then Saturn's rings. I took a long-exposure picture of Ricky watching Tom: