"Taking an aurora photo is easy. Taking a good aurora photo is hard!"
Dennis Mammana
So we have now been here a month. We've all settled very nicely and still Svalbard is proving itself an amazing adventure. Unfortunately routine isn't something space physicists are allowed. Starting this week we began our field work. Which unlike lectures that start at 9 in the morning, we meet up at 4:30PM and stay up at the observatory until 1:00AM. (I prefer working at night so that's been a bonus!) When we switch back to lectures I think I'll suffer with the worst non-flight related jet lag.
Getting to the Observatory
We have spent everyday at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO), getting there was always quite fun. We would meet up at UNIS and ride a van all the way up to mine-7, and then take the beltwagon (ATV) to the observatory.
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| The Aber 7 riding the beltwagon |
Monday
Monday was the first day there. Luckily it was a light introduction so there wasn't so much to do, and the conditions were amazing to see the aurora.
On the right is the KHO, it hosts many optical instruments (I'll make some posts on the sciencey side later) and is the building we spent most of the week in. We were given a tour of the main instruments we were going to us and study. The reason we can't where head-torches or use camera flashes it that it interferes with the instruments (and that ruins the measurements).
Tuesday
There was something special about this day... PANCAKES! We were running the Northern most pancake day. The KHO having a kitchen made this a lot more achievable.
Although we have a lot of fun we have to work as well. One of our main duties was to monitor the readings and predict when we'll see aurora and inform people if there is aurora outside.
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| Look at me working hard! |
We did take breaks though and had a laugh playing Welsh hangman.
And that's Tuesday!
Calibration day! I'll explain the details in another post, but all the instruments were turned off and we climbed over the roof and helped calibrate some of the instruments for the rest of the year. (They don't do it again so there's a lot riding on us!)
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| Taken by the KHO |
That's me in the blue coat, we thought we were pulling some equipment up to the roof. It turns out we didn't need to pull this particular piece up, so we were loitering on the roof for about 20 minutes and got caught being nosey!
We had a journalist from France join us who will be compiling a video of what we did over the last two days. He may have caught me slipping while trying to catch a fragile box.
The final day at the KHO, and as luck would have the cloudiest. Thursday was filled with mathematical work. So the whole group spent the day triangulating the position of a line current aurora that we witnessed on Tuesday (or would have if we weren't eating pancakes... nah we had gone home at that point).
As you can see we are very good at concentrating on our work.
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