Panama – a narrow strip of land separating two oceans, until we were audacious enough to build a canal between them. The majority of this canal is Lake Gatún, which was formed by the damming of the Chagres river. What were once hills and valleys became islands and flat water. I’ll be spending two weeks…

Mt. Lemmon is the highest point of the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson. It is an excellent location for telescopes because of its high elevation (over 9100 feet), isolation from city lights, and consistently sunny weather. I recently had a chance to see through one of these instruments on a chilly evening spent with the…

Spring is here, and the herpetofauna are becoming active once again. Here is a Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) in a defensive posture. These lizards are venomous via grooves in the teeth, so a close approach is unwise. They move surprisingly quickly!

A certain groundhog is fond of predicting the end of the east coast’s winter – but it is unclear if these augurings have any bearing on the Sonoran desert, thousands of miles away. Perhaps the generalities of large-scale climate oscillations (El Niño, for example) couple these two parts of the world. This year the groundhog…