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!