Qmckenna’s Weblog

One of the most anxious and exciting moments a sailor faces is coming into a harbor at night. Even if you know it pretty well, it looks different. Distances seem new, darkness foreshortens space and makes everything seem both closer together and oddly disjointed. When I learned to fly one of the most memorable exercises was the night cross country flight, largely for the same reasons. Visually, flying at night is simpler than during the day because the visual field is significantly reduced. If you trust that no one is flying around with out lights and that there isn’t a misplaced mountain nearby, lights distill what you need to pay attention to. It changes a little bit when you descend for a landing. Without real sight of land, you rely on instruments to tell you rate of descent and altitude. Let’s just say that my landing at Harris Ranch (for a steak dinner, no wine) was harder and a few seconds earlier than I expected.
I thought of harbors and night-lit airports the other night after adding a NAS (Network Attached Storage) to our home network. It’s bright blue LED (it would be a first magnitude star) was the one that made the bedroom just too twinkly–there must be 35 LEDs among the computer and peripherals. It was a bit much for a bedroom, so I got out the tape and hung paper covers on most of the lights, turning the bestarred harbor back into a refuge fit for sleep.