Day Sixteen - Wet!

An early start today as Andrew and I headed to the ARIES site to effect repairs. We think that we have successfully straightened all of the antennae that were leaning most. We also replaced all but one of the broken guy wires (we ran out of rope) and fixed two of the frayed ropes.

That took most of the morning and some of the afternoon. It rained through most of it, though there were some dry patches. When I got up this morning I was surprised to not see the hill behind the VHF it was completely obscured by fog/cloud from top to bottom.

Tonight the weather at Tromso is poor but at Keops it is clear and so we are running the UCL DAEA experiment. Unfortunately whilst it might be optically clear there is little or no ionosphere over Kiruna according to the radar and so the data looks very poor. Indeed we have nothing but noise from both remote sites.

It is dismantle time for the optics here at Tromso. Todd has taken his camera down and has calibtrated it thanks to sources supplied by Bjorn Gustafson. I left him packing it away a couple of hours ago. Similarly I clambered into the dome space and very carefully removed DASI and Sparkle. DASI has now been packed into its case and Sparkle awaited calibration, which Andrew is now performing whilst I babysit the radar. We need to disconnect our dome blowers and reinstate the Canadian dome blower before we leave.

Looking forward to getting home. Overall the campaign has been a mixed bag; the optics side has been a let down with only one night of potentially good data for Lancaster. I don't know how UCL have done with their FPI measurements. The Finns also had a wash out. We do have some good radar data from other experiments and so it has been successful on that scale.

Though of course every silver lining has a dirty, big, rain-filled cloud behind it. One of my interests in the PAMS study is identifying precipitation drift echoes. I think we have found some in the data from the 8/10/2005, and I suspect we have some on the 10/10/2005. Unfortunately there is a big data gap in the LANL data just at that time so I have no way of verifying. Hopefully this is a temporary effect.

Next campaign we will hopefully have the freshly repaired ARIES running and we will be able to get some very nice high spatial resolution data for both PAMS and DLETE. But that can wait until 2006...

Day Fifteen - One full day to go

Today has been quite quiet. Unlike the night in which the wind blew hard; and I mean hard. The hilton was shaking and I did wonder whether when I got up, I would have same view out of the window that I had when I went to bed!

It has drizzled with rain all day but we do have some very good news: the sky is clear at Keops and so tonight we will run the DAEA experiment for UCL. Andrew managed to barter with Mike Rietveld and Brett Isham for some time since they had first priority.

Apart from that there is little to report. We went to the local shop again and were served by the jolly man this time. He said some things to us in Norwegian even though we are sure he knows that we are ignorant English. He seemed very happy as per usual. Of course, he could be tossing terribly obscene insults at us and we would never know...

Early start tomorrow. It is still forecast to be piddling down with rain but we have one last chance to get to ARIES and make some repairs. We shall see what we can manage. After that I have to ensure that I get a copy of the Heater log so as to ensure that my expectations of what was on and what was off match up with reality. We have no facility for transferring data with us and so we rely in RAL to do that for us. I think next time we should bring a hard drive to grab data and potential analysis that we do on site. No time for analysis tomorrow with our field trip, but we are well set up to make a start when we get back to the UK (after some time off maybe?). We will also run the radar tomorrow night, once again for DAEA I think. Then there is also the matter of dismantling the photometer and cameras and putting the hut back as it was. This can be done in stages since once we know that DROP is over with, we can take down Sparkle and pack it up for transport.

Todd had some good news about his camera. He can potentially fix the instrument in Oslo and then ship it back up to Svalbard ready for the season. This is very good because so far the guy has endured rain, broken equipment and 6 hours of hand cranking an instrument to enable good data recordings.

Tomorrow is my 3rd wedding anniversary. The second where I have been away from Emma in service to Comms. Systems at Lancaster University. How is that for devotion??? Now, when is a good time to start talking about a pay rise?

Day Fourteen - Data afterglow and evening

Yesterday (Monday, Day 14) was a very succesful run for my two experiments: PAMS (Pulsed Absorption in the Morning Sector) and DLETE (D - Layer Electron Temperature Enhancements).

During the earlier PAMS run we had some very nice precipitation effects that were distinctly quai-periodic, including potential drift echoes, which is another of my interests. The DLETE run is always harder to measure since we are interested not in the electron density, but rather in measuring any perceptable effects on the electron temperature. Te is notoriously difficult to measure in the D-Layer with incoherent scatter techniques. In fact, for difficult, read impossible. The closest thing we can get is to measure the spectral width of the returned signal; this is partly controlled by the electron temperature. By using the heater to pump in an on/off cycle we can compare the change in width on a statistical basis. That is the plan, anyway. However today we had a more immediate indicator that our heating was having an effect. As I reported, some PMWE appeared. It did disappear after a while but then cam back and it looks as if we might have succeeded in modulating it. For the last half hour or so we switched to a 1 minute on/off cycle and saw distinct changes in the returned power at the same frequency. There were other factors that made this very exciting as well. You can see the results on our EISCAT results page along with results from the FACE experiment runs.

Although cloudy last night Andrew ran the FACE experiment, this time using the arc1 modulation. However the data from the remotes was incredibly poor, even for similar levels of electron density. Andrew is working on his Plasma Line experiment but due to some possible changes in the operating system (we don't know what) it would not work. Brett Isham is having similar problems. The UHF started acting up towards the end of the run and so with a few minutes to go until teh scheduled stop time Andrew called a halt when yet another crow bar took the system down.

One thing that I have learned on this campaign is that in terms of steady reliabilty, the VHF surpasses the UHF. However the VHF is severely limited in pointing direction and when it has had faults they always seem to be big, hard to repair ones. It may go offline less frequently, but if we relied on just it we would probably be offline for long periods.

Day Fourteen - The Saga Continues...

I shall be switching over to DLETE in about 6 minutes. Mike will begin tuneup at 8 UT and then we will modulate at 08:10 UT. The pattern I chose basically swaps short bursts for longer on periods in 20/30/40 minute cycles. This provides several oppurtunities to decipher the heating effect in the D-layer by integrating over cycles without having too much variability in the ionosphere from the start to the end of the cycle. Well that is my intention.

So far the PAMS run has been a pretty good success. The increased electron density at ~6:15 UT has hung around and in fact has shown signs of long period quasi-periodicity. Thus I have managed to capture an example of both standard ULF and quasi-periodic precipitation in this campaign.

In addition since ~7:20 UT there has been a varying but generally consistent signature at about 68 km altitude in the electron density. This has all the hallmarks of being PMWE. It may hang around as we begin to heat which would be interesting. I wonder how much Mike Kosch might pay me for access to this data :-)

Although the data is good for PAMS I am happy to switch to DLETE. The increased D layer provides an excellent target plus the results of modelling by SGO indicates that the effect on absorption is very small (hence much integration). So as long as we analyse carefully we should be confident that any effects to EISCAT are solely in the spectral width and not in the electron density and are unlikely to appear in a time series beyond the noise. Thus this DLETE data will be good for PAMS studies also.

I think.


The PMWE might have disappeared, though it is hard to say as we got some very intense precipitation down to 65 km around 8 UT. DLETE modulation actually began at 08:15 UT after a slight cock-up between local and universal time.

Day Fourteen (UPDATED)

Another early start today, but probably my last. I am inclined towards cancelling my last PAMS run tomorrow, I'd rather keep 12 hours in reserve. Plus I don't want to use all of the UK time on my experiments when there is still the tiny possibility of running the optics.

Things started quietly this morning. No D-layer to speak of, though I think that a few hours earlier had been better. Most activity seems to be occuring further poleward, including some ULF signatures. It improved here at about 6:15 UT when some strong precipitation occurred. Unfortunately this coincided with a large crowbar (the fourth of the morning) that took the radar offline for almost 5 minutes - a great shame. Anyway, things continue to look good for the moment.

It is my intention to swap to DLETE at 8 UT today, unless Mike has other ideas. A breakdown of my time so far (and projected) is shown. Since I am working on a 1.8 multiplication for DLETE I hope that EISCAT does not round up my usage, that is a vital half hour :-)


I spent a good portion of yesterday asleep so no proper data analysis has been done yet. The first day still looks the best though. Andrew and I did go to the ARIES site yesterday evening in an attempt to fix some more guy wires. However, we noted that those that we did manage to do last week had no tension. When an attempt was made to remove the slack via the rusty looking thingames (yes, that is a technical term) at the bottom of the wire, it would not budge - even with a squirt of faux-WD40. Andrew taped up his (rapidly disintegrating) knots to try and hold it in place and then we left. We would have stayed longer except that a driving wind had come up, it was getting dark and we were drenched in the rain! Perhaps we will try again today, but we feel that we are making zero progress. The good news is that the actual antenna poles and the dipoles look to be in very good order.

UPDATE: I notice that all data from SEC at NOAA seems to be stuck on two days ago. This means no current geostationary data and I am relying on SOHO for my solar wind data. Mike Rietveld has fixed the Dynasonde, however.

UPDATE2: D'oh! I mixed my hours up. Today should only have been 3.5 for PAMS since we started DLETEing at 8 UT. This has been corrected.

UPDATE3: More D'oh! Due to exciting results, and in pursuit of science, the DLETE run for today was extended to ~13:30 UT. This means that my little chart is completely wrong and so I shall post another in the next day or so.

Day Thirteen - The data keeps coming...

The second PAMS run today. The Japanese are in the middle of their experiment which runs well into tonight and so scuppers any chance of FACE and DROP. This is not such a loss since the cloud is now back and the forecast has returned to rain. I am able to run PAMS only as it is a VHF experiment and does not interfere with the Japanese.

Andrew volunteered to get up and start PAMS for me since I had been up for ~20 hours straight yesterday. He didn't seem to think that operating on 2-3 hours sleep after that was a good idea. I relieved him at 8:30 and he has gone back to bed. We were thinking of hitting the ARIES site later to do repairs but with a combination of knackeredness and potential rain, we are unsure now.

The data for today's PAMS run is not as good as yesterday. It started with a strong, precipitation induced D layer but that disappered soon afterwards. We also have lots of meteor effects (we think) and a strange 'line' running across at ~100 km altitude in the form of a sharpish gradient in the electron density. Need to investigate that, it appeared yesterday as well. Pretty quiet overall. All ULF activity is north of Tromso according to the magnetograms and surprisingly little in the way of drifting precipitation patches.

PAMS ended at 08:30 UT with a load bang and flash of the lights as the UHF crowbarred. This has happened a few times today, three of them caused the VHF to go down as well.

Right, I'm off back to bed. Summary plots of the data collected so far will apear in due course. We are not sure where yet. The RAL campaign site is a possibility, I will have a fiddle with it later. It seems overly complicated. Whatever happened to the days of bashing out a few lines of html? ;-)

Day Twelve - We have some more data

EISCAT shortly before dawn. Look, some clear skies with just a few clouds...

As I reported yesterday we had some clear skies. The PAMS experiment ran well with some strange interference lines which we suspect might be meteors. This appears to be happening this morning as well, more on that later. Due to a beautiful ULF wave appearing I started DLETE a little late but we also managed 3.5 hours of combined VHF and Heating. No idea how that worked, we will need to get at the spectral width information to have any understanding of whether we successfully heated the D-layer (feel like doing some data analysis Vikki?).

The clear skies lasted well into the night as did the warmth (17 degrees during the day). It was fantastic. We had some great auroral displays including black aurora and some clear pulsating aurora, all caught on camera. The only optical problem was actually a biggie. Part of Todd's camera broke, it was kind of an essential part as well since it helped drive the filter wheel. The FACE experiment is highly dependent on multiwavelength imaging and this was our one chance to get this done properly. Todd had a solution, however. He climbed into the small loft space underneath the dome and manually cranked the filter wheel around every minute. He did this solidly for six hours. I am still in awe! Andrew ran the radar whilst I sat and shouted which filter was displayed and whether it was properly aligned, the system worked incredibly well for 5 of the 6 hours. In the last hour (23-24 UT/01-02 LT) things went quite wrong, the computer slowed down so that I could no longer see the images straight away such that I was ruinning with a delay. Also Todd went out of synch by one filter, possibly due to slight overcranking and the mix up with the delayed image. However it was a fantastic feat and I imagine he is having a well deserved sleep now.

Radar operations reportedly ran relatively smoothly. Andrew had some problems talking to Sodankyla via EROS, though this cleared up by 19:40 UT. Brett ran the VHF for the HFSEE stuff (I think).

All in all I think that last night was a success. At last. It was starting to look as if we would not get any data.

Photos of aurora, mars and stars shall follow, once I have had some more sleep...

Day Twelve - We have some data...

Good morning.

Well for the first time on this campaign we have some data. Unfortunately it is not connected to the optics which are yet to have any success. This morning I started the PAMS experiment on the VHF (at 1.4MW) and everything seems to be running okay. Lots of activity, but not much in the way of precipitation into the D Layer which is a shame, but it is early days yet. Quite disheartening to note that there was a very nice ULF wave in the magnetograms a couple of hours ago. Since this experiment is all about studying ULF wave induced precipitation it would have been nice to have caught it, but that can't be helped.

I notice that every so often the arc_dlayer_ht returns some very messy data between 95 and 115 km. I hope this isn't a regular feature. Actually just noticed that it has fallen over so have restarted, looking good now.

I was very pleased to be greeted by clear skies and stars when I left the Hilton this morning. There is plenty of patchy cloud about (turning nicely pink as I speak) but things are look distinctly better. Fingers crossed that this lasts until tonight.

Another pleasant surprise was this. The coronal hole hit right on time. Of course this does not guarantee increased absorption, but statistically, the probability of increased CNA is larger during high speed solar wind. I am also encouraged by the appearance of a D layer in the real time analysis (set to 10 second integration - bit messy but interesting). This is enforced by the disappearance of all data from the digisonde. HF absorption anyone?

The realtime analysis does not seem to be updating to the web. I am not sure why.

All in all, though, it's a beautiful day. Only another 6 and a half hours of radar running to go now...

Day Eleven

Meeting of the bigwigs at EISCAT this morning. Said hello to Tony and Ingemar. Andrew asked Roger if he could extend the run on Saturday to try and make the best of the potentially better weather. This now includes running the Lancaster and UCL experiments depending on what the weather is like at Tromso and Kiruna respectively.

We took Todd to the Observatory this morning and listened to his talk. Saw some very nice data. The weather had brightened; temperatures increased and the cloud deck had risen. The mountain behind EISCAT was visible for the first time in days. There was some wind but on the whole it looked like it might just clear up.

Got back to Ramfjord in time for lunch after which we decided to use the good weather to best effect and do some ARIES repairs. Before that we headed over to the main building; I made some necessary preparations for my runs tomorrow morning. In that short space of time the weather changed. The clouds descended once again and were accompanied by wind and rain. ARIES looked a lot less attractive, hopefully we will have the chance to get out there on Sunday since the Japanese are hogging almost the whole day.

DROP is scheduled to start in 45 minutes but looks unlikely with the current weather. Other than that we have nothing booked for this evening. The UHF and VHF are both running with Heating at the moment so things are looking good.

Day Ten - A slight scattering of stars

It has stopped raining. More than that, we have had some stars. This gave us the opportunity to get out and focus Todd's camera (DASI looked good already - how is that for driving blind?).

So now we have lots of very cool images of clouds, for not long after the clouds parted, they closed back in again. They did open up again for a while but have since closed. In fact they might be dropping some rain as when I just looked ouside I got a drip right in the eye!

Well, this makes me a little more optimistic for tomorrow. Until then, g'night.

Day Ten

At 06:40 local time there was little rain. Instead it was quite misty. However it was far too early to be up and so I went back to bed. Next time I got up, it was definitely raining. A stroll over to the EISCAT main building told me that they were busily working on getting the radars fixed and the problems of yesterday were not as serious as they might have first been thought.

There were breaks in the clouds that came and went. Andrew and I went to the local shop for local people and were scowled at by the local lady, we think she was trying to be nice. In the afternoon we took Todd to the ARIES site and in the pouring rain and at much personal cost attempted to fix some of the ARIES antennae. Andrew managed to 'fix' two of the guy wires on two of the worst leaning antennae; I held the ladd antenna straight. We were thoroughly disheartened at the job that lay ahead and considered that our 'repairs' were not likely to last. Mike Rietveld and Brett Isham were at the site with their Russian colleagues performing SEE experiments. They took some photos of us and had a good laugh. Unfortunately it seems that Mike no longer works for Max Planck and so I could not blackmail him into fixing the antennae for us. We gave up and ran from the rain. Todd did suggest that it could have been snow damage; Mike confirmed that the snow had reached to about that level in the spring and so perhaps the damage was a consequence of cycling thawing and freezing?

Weather conditions are not good. Some blue sky has been spotted but is very much in the vein of the Scarlet Pimpernel: elusive. Consequently DROP has been cancelled (unless a miracle happens within the next few minutes).

Tomorrow final decisions have to be made for the weekend and Monday. At the moment, I am of the opinion that I will cancel DLETE on Sunday and will run on Saturday and Monday. PAMS will run on all three days. Of course this is conditional on the radars being operational. A possible problem arises on Sunday; the Japanese have priority on the UHF and of course that prevents me from running with the UHF if the VHF is broken, so fingers crossed. In addition they emailed Mike Rietveld and asked for no heating during the period of their run, Mike forwarded this to Andrew and I, but since they are first priority it is doubtful we would have run anyway.


Currently testing of the UHF and VHF are ongoing but we have had some impressive crowbars. Things have been stable for a while now, but we have very little power on the UHF (800-900 kW) and 1400 kW on the VHF. The Finns will be in soon to do their run. Currently they are happy to use their time even though the optical conditions are poor.

Todd is giving a seminar at the University tomorrow morning and Andrew and I will head over with him for 10 am. Hopefully tomorrow evening will provide for some observations. Saturday is still looking to be our best bet since the weather forecast is more favourable. Once again, fingers crossed.

Day Nine - Afternoon

The rain motif to this blog is getting a little dull now, but then that perfectly reflects the weather. It just doesn't want to stop raining!!!

Optical experiments for this evening have been scrapped. The Finns ran another two hours on the ANTII experiment which might have turned out to be very wise since the good news on the VHF might have been premature. Both radars are now broken. There was talk of arcing and broken Klystrons though things are not clear at the moment.

Since it is day nine of a sixteen day campaign, this means that we are well over halfway in with absolutely zero UK data.

Day Nine - morning

It's raining. A lot.

Things are getting a little desperate at the moment. We have lost lots of optical timeand the weather forecast suggests that Saturday will be the earliest possibility for optical observations, and even that is patchy.

There is good news, though, Todd's equipment is up and seems to be working. He went up on the roof to give the dome a good clean (I held the ladder) after making sure his camera was stable. Now we just sit and wiat for stars so that he can focus it (and so we can focus DASI as well).

In addition, the UHF went funny again last night, right at the end of the Finnish run. They think it is fixed now but we don't know for sure. The excellent news is that today they managed to have the VHF running for Antti's experiment, ANTII. This is very similar to our DLETE experiment except that for part of the time they are using a new code of Marku's design, SIPPI.
As for DLETE, it is due to start on Saturday, with a run on Sunday and one on Monday. My thought is to cancel either Saturday or Sunday, depending on the Space Weather, and reduce Monday to two hours from the 4. This will mean I have used only 6 hours and will still have time in reserve to run next year with ARIES. In addition PAMS is due to start on Saturday; this coincides with the impact of a high speed stream from a coronal hole as predicted by Space Weather. I am pleased to see that my own prediction appears to be holding up. I will run this on both Saturday and Sunday and possibly on Monday. That leaves me with 12 hours for next year. In addition I think I shall use the new ard_dlayer high time resolution experiment. This could give potentially interesting results.

No photos for a while, basically there is not much worth shooting. :-(

Day Eight

A busy day today and yes it was still raining.

We took Todd shopping at Rema 1000 just outside Tromso. I note for future campaigners, it seemd that Rema 1000 do not tkae any credit cards that are not Norwegian. I think this is a new development as I am sure that I have used a credit card there before. Heck, even the petrol station outside of Skibotn takes credit cards!

After lunch we watched Todd set up his impressive camera. Thankfully it had all the necessary parts except for mouse, keyboard and monitor. Andrew and I were able to get ahold of these for him as well as a transformer to swap from 110 volts to 220 volts. Although this was the camera from NyAlesund on Svalbard, they have a room set up for them on 110 volts up there.

Everything seemed to work great. Todd is very keen on using an internet connection in the hut so that he can run things remotely. This may not be possible. The only internet connection is being used by the Canadians and they must have arranged for it to work with Chris Hall, since Mike never bothered having it switched on. Pulling the plug might not be viable as we do not know what the exact deal is or what information may be being passed through the connection.

We moved the camera and equipment to the hut and set up properly. Todd had to cut the hole in the wall a little larger to get all the cables through, but after some effort he got the tripod and camera up into the roof space with a few inches to spare between the lens and the dome. However, disaster struck before long. When we plugged the transformer into the socket and connected Todd's multisocket strip, it blew up and tripped the breaker. It seems that the output ground is connected to one of the input pins on the transformer; thus when plugged in one way up everything is fine (output ground is connected to the input neutral) and the other way and the output ground is connected to the input live. Result? Kaboom!

Thankfully the only thing to blow was the surge protector on the multisocket; Basically it was trying to account for 220 volts. If it had not been there we could have either fried thousands of pounds worth of equipment and/or one of us. It seems that this has happened before.

We have aquired (thanks to Mike Rietveld) a better transformer and we shall try to get hold of another surge protecter tomorrow. Then we shall see what happens.

The UHF was fixed today. Something had burned out in the Transmitter electronics. The Finns ran the ANTII experiment which may have been successful but since they recorded their data separately they will only know following analysis. The Heater worked!

The Finns are also running now. The sky is mostly cloudy but cleared enough for Andrew to get optimistic enough to go to the hut. We set the photometer running just to see what it would see. Unfortunately there was a lot of hazy cloud around making it difficult to focus DASI properly.

Day Seven - anyone seen Noah?

Today it rained.

And then it rained some more.

Then a bit later on it rained.

Overall today was decidedly damp. The hut, thankfully, remained dry and so Andrew's skilled patching (I held the ladder) worked beautifully. Sparkle (the photometer) was working exactly as expected - far too sensitive. By ~7 local time we had a workable signal. But we did not loiter since optical conditions were not at their best. Did I mention that it rained?

We went and bugged Mike Rietveld for a couple of hours as he tried to fix the Dynasonde. We tried to help and he graciously pretended that we had.

Todd's camera and tripod arrived at ~6ish local time and we stacked it in the main building. The delivery men got a little wet, because it was raining. Whilst we were in the control room they did a little test on the radar (UHF) to verify that it was working. The VHF is still not working, Roger thought they might have a go at fixing it again tomorrow. There was a fantastic rainbow outside the control room at this time giving us a glimpse of sunshine. Of course, the other important contributing factor in a rainbow is that there is rain. Which there was.

We went to pick Todd up at the airport. His flight was slightly delayed on the flight status website, but in fact landed 4 minutes early. We were easily there to meet him. On the way back to the radar site the weather changed. It rained a lot harder. We gave him a quick tour of the radar building, which was curiously empty considering the Finns were supposed to be running. Todd seems satisfied with his lodgings at Heating and we left him to get some sleep and we will all go shopping in the morning. Upon arriving back at the Hilton we discovered that the UHF was broken. Everything seemed to be working okay but there was absolutely no transmission, though everything said that there was. This is very bad. It also means that the Heater is the only EISCAT facility in Tromso in working order and we are not even sure about that since Mike has not tested it since July.


For those who are interested here is a picture of our hire car as we let some locals take it for a spin around the site. It is very economical with fuel and the emissions, though somewhat distracting at first are incredibly environmentally friendly. It even runs well in the rain.

Blogging the Aurora

As I promised a couple of days ago, here are some shots of the aurora. They were taken on the night of the 30th September 2005. The display was very impressive. Originally it had been very cloudy and Andrew and I were amazed at how bright the clouds were with the aurora behind them. Shortly afterwards the clouds started to clear away and we were treated to some great views, though none as bright as earlier. Tero came out from running his instruments to get some personal photos.

The display continued from about 10pm local time and we saw it fade and brighten a couple of times over the course of an hour or so. We also saw some black aurora that we were able to record with the DASI camera in the hut, though the timestamp on the tape is out slightly as we were not prepared to run at that point. There was still aurora around when we headed inside sometime after 11:30pm local time.

Once again I was using my digital Canon Power Shot S45. I jigged around with the exposure time in an effort to try and capture some of the more dynamic aspects of the show, unfortunately this didn't really work. The end results are nowhere near as good as some I have seen (e.g. Jouni Jussila), but I am quite pleased with some of them; especially those where you can make out the snow on the mountain and the radar dishes.


For this one I am looking right up the field line and you can see plenty of stars behind. I did try to capture some black aurora embedded in a diffuse patch a short while before I took this. Unfortunately I was too slow in setting up and missed it. I often try to get some other objects in with the aurora in order to give some perspective but this looked too good as it was.


In some of them you can clearly see that there are clouds still hanging around. It is a real shame that the longer exposure time tends to blur the fine detail of the arcs so much though. I'll have to have a fiddle with the various settings and try to improve it.

I think this one has to be my favourite. There is some great structure 'crowning' the mountain and the auroral arc extends right across the sky with distinct rays. The snow on the mountain shows up really well as do a few stars poking through from behind the green emission. You can just about make out the VHF antenna infront of the mountain, whereas the tree in the foreground creates a good border and perspective. The red light is not from any auroral emission (though we did see some lower red borders) and is instead the reflection of the city lights of Tromso.

Day Six - A Wet Sunday Afternoon

Surprise, surprise it was cloudy and raining today. The Norwegian meteorologists seem to have been spot on so far. I must admit though that the low cloud and drizzle this evening was actually quite pleasant. The clouds did lift slightly and let the sunshine through, but not for long. Mike Rietveld was at Heating in case we decided to run; he had a piece of the Dynasonde to fix - it has been broken since Friday. Andrew and I did go to the hut and turned the photometer on to see how it handled the light at the experiment start time (16:30 UT). Not well as it turned out. The instrument is much more sensitive than Mike thought. With the aperture at F11 the signal was close to saturation; fully open and no chance what so ever, and this was in cloudy conditions. We did note that by 17:00 UT the aperture could be opened fully and a useable signal was available. We discussed with Thomas the possibility of eating into the Finnish time and there are some possibilities depending on geomagnetic conditions.

We have lent a GPS unit to Mike Rietveld so that the Russians can get a good fix of where they are setting up their equipment. He supplied the batteries so I guess its fair. The Finns are running the UHF tonight and it seems to be going fine; Thomas said that on Friday night it worked very well, with only a single crowbar occurring. Mike Rietveld said that the cause of the sporadic operations might well have been that the water cooling in the hub room needed topping up. He is optimistic that the VHF will work, though as I reported previously it needs a piece of kit from the UHF at the moment. Fine for us, not so fine for the Finns who want both operating.
That reminds me, one of the UCL FPIs (Kiruna) is broken and as such this likely puts paid to their experiment.


Nothing much else exciting today. A horse and trap from the stables down the road came along but I was too slow with my camera. One of the technicians turned up extra early due to some sort of mix-up. Pete Chapman has asked us to attempt repairs on the ARIES array; some replacement kit is available and some of the guy ropes had enough spare that we might be able to do something. So if the weather improves and we have the time we will head over there and fix things up.

No word from Todd yet. I am half expecting a call at 12:30 AM (local time) asking to be picked up from the airport. More worrying still is that there is no sign of his camera. Mike Rietveld had a call last week saying it was in Oslo. No sign since then...

We shall see what tomorrow brings.

Day Five

Today has been very grey and raining. Andrew confirmed with Mike Rietveld the cancellation of tonight's DROP experiment, though suffered pangs when the clouds started to clear. Thankfully it all went grotty again very soon afterwards. Instead we went and set the equipment up in their 'final' configuration. Andrew crawled around in the very limited space beneath the dome in an effort to fit the camera and photometer in with the Norstar camera. I held the ladder.

Our fiddling involved setting the correct angle and alignment for the DASI camera, except that we had noticed dark spots on the monitor. After vigorous cleaning of the screen the spots remained and so Andrew dismantled the lens and we set about polishing that. Upon refitting the spots had diminished and so we were pleased. With some fiddling around with the compass and inclinometer Andrew was able to get the camera properly pointed up the field line, though it was not far off anyway.

After the camera came the photometer. This needed to be stood somewhat higher than simply in the floor. First attempt used three large wooden blocks that Mike had lying around in the hut (as you do). This produced a decent height such as the other instruments were removed from the field of view, but it was somewhat unstable. We next hit upon the idea of using the small stool/stairs, which proved a much better mount. The only problem now was that the photometer does not point vertically when sat on its base; to compensate we shoved a thin pad of paper under one side such that the instrument faced upwards properly. Ah, the wonders of modern technology.

It was far too cloudy to focus the camera properly at this stage, but when we turned the photometer on we found a very large signal in the green line. Much larger than with any of the other filters. We dived outside to see if there was bright aurora behind the clouds - and promptly dived back in after getting soaked by the heavy rain!

The signal faded after a while, and in the meantime Bjorn Gustafson popped in. He has not yet been to Skibotn, it turned out, instead he intends to travel there on Monday. At the moment that is the ETA for Todd Pedersen (no time of day known). We are still waiting for his camera to arrive (this is slightly concerning). Bjorn, kindly drove us to the Hilton so that we could escape getting drenched in the rain!

Earlier today, Andrew and I went to the ARIES site. Thomas had mentioned some damage to the antennas. We did a unit-by-unit check and indeed found a number with broken or frayed guy ropes, broken top supports and/or large leans. Pete Chapman (via email) wonders whether it could be caused by Reindeer or UV. Personally I fear shoddy construction ;-)

The fraying did seem very regular, in very similar positions on each rope, we are baffled by the cause. After we returned from the ARIES site, we grabbed some lunch and Andrew spent some time working on his elan file for FACE, whilst I did some work on my laptop.

A curious site was a group of people stood and sat just down the site road from the Hilton. They had some dogs with them as well. We have no idea what they were doing unless they were a contingent of the least effective anti-radar demonstrators I have ever seen. It looked like they had come for a day out in the wet, and where better than EISCAT?