atmosphere/03_00_02.html). Popular Mechanics
magazine flew us to New York City, where they
gave Sarah a $1,000 Breakthrough Award and
tickets to a Broadway show for her and my wife
Minnie and me.
Prof. Leda N. Kobziar of the University of Idaho
learned about Sarah’s discovery and began
to conduct serious studies about microbes in
forest fire smoke. She acknowledged Sarah’s
serendipitous discovery as a new field of science
that she named pyroaerobiology.
Some of my own science projects were
significantly influenced by serendipity. I never
suspected that my homemade instruments
that accurately measure the ozone layer would
find an error in the ozone instrument aboard
NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite. But that finding was
confirmed by Dobson 83, the world standard
ozone instrument, during my first visit to Hawaii’s
Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) in 1992 (Figure
G
). This unexpected discovery became my
first paper in Nature, one of the world’s leading
science journals.
The LED twilight photometer I described
in these pages (“Build a Twilight Photometer
to Detect Stratospheric Particles,” makezine.
com/projects/twilight-photometer) has led
to several serendipitous findings. The most
significant occurred in May 2022, when one
of my photometers detected a band of water
vapor 56km (183,727 ft) overhead. This was
an unprecedented water vapor band in the
mesosphere from the historic volcanic eruption
of Hunga Tonga on January 15, 2022 (see “King
of the Ring of Fire,” Make: Volume 84). My finding
was quickly noticed by several scientists, and
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center followed
through with an assignment for me to develop five
new twilight photometers and continue making
twilight measurements.
That’s what I’ve been doing since July 2022,
and during three twilights I photographed a green
halo around the sun (Figure
H
). (These were not
green flashes, which I’ve photographed several
times from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory.)
So far none of the scientists I’ve contacted can
explain this phenomenon, which is apparently
another colorful example of serendipity.
103
make.co
D
F G H
E
Sarah Mims suspends Petrifilms over burning grass
to prove that biomass smoke contains viable bacteria
and fungi.
Sarah flying a kite from Padre Island, Texas, to
capture smoke particles and fungi arriving across
the Gulf of Mexico from Yucatan.
Signe Dons, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, Forrest Mims, Grae Roth
Sarah’s smoke detector was a
microscope slide clipped inside
a plastic cup suspended from
her kite.
Forrest at Mauna Loa Observatory
in 1992 with his homemade TOPS-
1 ozone instrument that found an
error in NASA’s ozone satellite.
Green ring around the sun, Dec.
15, 2022, possibly associated with
aerosol particles from the historic
Hunga Tonga eruption of Jan. 2022.
M85_100-3_AmSci_F1.indd 103M85_100-3_AmSci_F1.indd 103 4/10/23 2:02 PM4/10/23 2:02 PM
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