Day Four

Apologies for the late posting. Unfortunately the link to the internet from EISCAT went down and remained so until today (1/10/2005). This meant that we had no internet and no communication with the remote sites and no real time data displays. The Finns did run last night starting at 18:30 UT though it was quite cloudy for the first few hours. However, at about 10pm local time the cloud lifted and there was some beautiful aurora. More on that in a minute.

It had been very cloudy and grey all day and the weather didn't make the news any easier to take; it seems that the optimism in the VHF working was misplaced. When Roger said that all the bits work so it should work, it seems that he was wrong. The whole thing on its own does not work. They will try fixing it on Monday. Thomas seems to think that it will work on one antenna, so I guess he has spoken to someone more recently than I have. The UHF has had lots of problems today, I'm not sure what, but Roger said that it was working "unstably".

Martin Blixt and Bjorn Gustaffson called in on their way to Skibotn and gave us a digital recorder for the camera for studying black aurora. Unfortunately Andrew discovered some problems with camera leads. Seems we have a 50 ohms lead and need a 75 ohms. However, it does seem to work okay. Though Andrew has had to split the signal from the camera between the monitor and the recorder since we do not have the cables to link the monitor on after the recorder. There is also some sort of echo on the playback of the tapes (very small) and we are not sure whether this is a function of the playback since it is different when the data is being recorded.
Tero told us that the Finnish photometer went kaput. The weather forcast says rain and cloud for the next few nights. So far this campaign seems to be a little cursed.

Andrew intends to cancel Saturday's DROP and the Finns cancelled their experiments for Saturday.

Day Three - Starry, Starry Night

It has been very clear tonight. There was some aurora to the north with ray structures, but it faded after a while. Mostly we just saw lots and lots of stars with a good few satellites thrown in.

Andrew spent part of the evening in the hut. The good news was that the camera appears to be spontaneously working. Of course, since we know it went wrong and don't know why it now works we are worried that it may go faulty again.

Andrew realised that when we mounted the DASI camera we never once thought about the orientation and as such we had no idea which way around it would be on the screen. After a call to Mike this problem was rectified and later checked with Andrew waving at edges such that we could tell where his hand was on the screen. After this is was a simple matter to identify what part of the sky we were looking at. Actually it was not simple at all and Andrew, Thomas and I all tried to match the stars to those on display in the Skymap program on the laptop.

After a while and after switching off the constellations and changing the magnitude limit and increasing the camera field of view we were able to identify what part of the sky we were looking at. It was not far from where it should be, though we will have to reduce the field of view by quite a lot according to Mike and that will make finding the correct angle somewhat tricky. That is a bridge to cross tomorrow.

In the meantime, Andrew and Mike need to decide whether to cancel any of the DROP runs (Heating only) this weekend and tell Roger tomorrow. The weather forecast is not good for Saturday and Monday. I need to decide what to do about DLETE; there is no ARIES due to technical problems delaying the installation, but it could still be useful to do some runs and look at the IRIS data as well.

In addition I checked with Mike Rietveld and Thomas was quite right about the 2 hour rule for the VHF during work hours. This means that I could potentially double my number of days by running 2 hours of Heater and VHF instead of 4 and I could save more time for a campaign next year when ARIES is operational. I shall email Farideh about this tomorrow as we have several days to consider it.

A lot more Finns arrived today, we shall soon be at full complement. We certainly have a lot more beer in the Hilton now!

Day Three - morning

Once again it was a beautiful sunny morning. Not as much to do today and so I am going to take advantage and do some work, though a shopping trip is necessary later.

Mike sent an email to Andrew with some suggestions for fixing the problem with the camera and so he headed over to the hut.

Potential issues:

(1) The lens is kaput, which is quite possible.
(2) The detector has moved within the camera, which is highly unlikely and it is not adjustable.
(3) There is something between the lens and detector, which has a refractive index other than air.

Andrew checked for number (3) but found no filter leaving (1) and (2). If (1) is the case we may have to buy or borrow a lens. If (2) is the case we are stuffed. Tonight we shall try the lens from the photometer on the camera - if we have the same problem then I think we might be in trouble...

MetaPost

Additional links will be added to this page as time goes by.
A formal campaign blog will hopefully be available very soon.

In the mean time Thomas Ulich has set up a Campaign site for the Finnish side of things, which also incorporates our experiments.

Day Two

Today was generally a day of preparation. The weather was beautiful this morning with clear skies. The CP2 run continued though there was still repairs to the UHF to be done. Notice in the picture to the right that there is a panel missing from the antenna.
Mike Rietveld told me that it came away during the high winds that they had here on Monday. He could not recall something like that happening before.


During the downtime of the UHF the EISCAT staff attempted to fix the VHF. No guarantees but we did notice that they were transmiting at one point. Hopefully this means that it could be available. Had an interesting discussion with Thomas, apparantly the VHF can be run for less than 4 hours at a time during normal working hours. If so this means that I can cut the DLETE times down to 2 hours around local noon and so extend the oppurtunity to run.

In preparation for the optical side of the campaign Andrew and I set up some of the equipment, though Andrew did most of this. The photometer appears to be working beautifully but there is a problem with the camera; the lens does not seem to suit it as we spent several hours this evening trying to get a good image of the stars (when the sky was clear) and failed miserably. Hopefully we can sort this tomorrow.


Andrew also performed some repairs to the wood around the dome in the hut, since we detected a slight leak. I held the ladder.

After the sunny start we had some very changeable weather in the afternoon and evening. We shall see what tomorrow brings.

Day One

Arrived at last.

We set off at 6:30 am to Manchester Airport. Having got caught in traffic a little bit we were still in plenty of time for the first flight. No problems to report and we arrived in Copenhagen. We did toy with the idea of attempting to get onto an earlier flight to Oslo but it was somewhat unfeasible due to the crowd at the transfer desk and the time we had to make the flight.

This turned out to be a result as our seats on the flight to Oslo were next to an exit. Lots of leg room :-)

Plus the TV monitors showed the view from an exterior camera on takeoff. Very cool, I had not seen that before.

Things started to fall apart when we reached Oslo. Our flight to Tromso was cancelled which left us with an extra 2 hour wait. We did bump into Mike Rietveld and Brett Isham who were heading upto the site, but they were on an earlier flight with a different airline, I don't know who.

Having boarded the plane (tiny leg space!) I was vaguely amused to see the baggage handler loading our cases onto the aircraft, but was less amused at his deliberate mishandling. Very heavy handed with no reason to be. One slight worry was that I failed to see the photometer case being loaded.

Thankfully the pilot on this leg did it very quickly and we arrived in Tromso at ~08:00 local time. Thankfully the photometer appeared, though quite late after our personal luggage and so I suspect it was loaded early. The guy at the AVIS desk was waiting for us (thanks to Mike Kosch and Ian McCrea) and we got an upgrade to a Toyota Corolla - no key in the traditional sense. Has a start button and you insert the whole unit to activate the ignition. Very nice motor though.

The weather at Tromso was generally clear, with some patchy cloud. Had obviously been raining a lot previously. In a spirit of exploration, and at Andrew's suggestion, I drove through the tunnel instead of the narrow bridge to the mainland. This proved a fine alternative and Mike will be pleased to learn that there is no toll. We made it to the supermarket with 8 minutes to spare and so we stocked up on essentials: bread, milk, cheese and tinned fish in tomato sauce!

Andrew decided that he would like to drive to EISCAT and so did so. Once at the radar site we gathered our key cards but found that we had to share due to the number of guests. We then unloaded the car and settled into the Hilton. I have luckily got a room facing the road, just as I like it and Andrew has the room opposite, facing away from the road, just as he likes it. Everybody is happy.

Upon a quick scout of the Hilton we discovered a dearth of mugs for some reason and also some bugger has pinched the telly! Ok so we only get two channels and they are both Norwegian, but come on!

The UHF is still running the common programme (CP2) though it seems to be having problems tonight - power is often on but there is no transmission, though last time I checked this appears to be fine. Spoke to Thomas Ulich who arrived yesterday. He told us that the VHF is unrepaired and is likely to remain so since they cannibalized some parts to fix the UHF. This makes running experiments such as DLETE and ANTII very unfavourable. I may cancel DLETE altogether but I might swap PAMS such that it will run on the UHF, the field aligned capability is somewhat desirable anyway. We shall see.

Tomorrow Andrew and I intend to set up the necessary optics in Mike's hut. Plus I think we will do a main shop. This will give me a chance to grab more cash to pay my room charge up front.

Night for now.