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.