February 20th, 2004

It was another beautiful day in Eureka!

Some have wondered whether we spend most of our time in the dark (outside of the short hour(s) of sunlight we had yesterday). This is not true. We do have light throughout much of the day. Today, we had twilight from before nine am until after four pm and this is increasing each day. It means that we are not as "sun-deprived" as you may have thought. It is much worse for the staff at the Weather Station. They are here for 3 months at a time and had almost one month of complete darkness from December - January. I think our comments over dinner last night about having "only 1 hour of Sun" were a bit annoying to them.

The Sun was visible for about 2 hours today with about half of the disk visible at its fullest. Since the Sun rises over mountain peaks, we had the opportunity to see it "rise" and "set" several times during the middle of the day. This fed the most recent obsession of the ACE Arctic Validation Campaign team - the search for the "green flash". This is an effect which is only seen through a very clean atmosphere. Differential refraction causes the Sun to appear to "flash" different colours as it rises or sets. Green happens to be the colour that is most visible but there is a red flash through to a blue flash (which is very hard to see). When the sun came up, there were five of us crowded into one of the south facing windows looking for the flash. From all of the yells of oooh, ahhhh and "look at that!", there was no doubt in the rest of the observatory that we had seen the green flash.

While the Sun was up further alignment checks were done for the PARIS instrument and it was determined that we need to adjust the height of the platform. This was done by notching the 2x4s we are using as a base. The signal to noise measurements for the DOAS spectrometer were completed and Annemarie and Tobias are ready to install it in its dome. Clive has been able to get the visible channel of the MAESTRO instrument operating but is still working on the UV. Apparently, MAESTRO did not like the little tumble it took off the lab bench. Hongjiang and Clive will be working on the tracker again to see whether it can be fixed. This would mean that Hongjiang does not have to go outside every 15 minutes or so to point the SPS at the Sun.

Also we have solved our transportation problems. Two trips to the AStrO laboratory each morning and evening meant that Keith, the AStrO operator, spent much of his time driving (and not getting much other work done) and it also shortened the time that we had available for work. So the question was put forward, could you put 8 people in all their arctic gear in an extended cab truck that was designed to hold 6 people maximum? It was postulated that we could as long as we found the optimum configuration. The hypothesis was proved true! The two trips today were accomplished by packing everyone (and their laptops) into the truck. At dinner, a small correction to the configuration was suggested that may make things more comfortable for Keith to drive. We'll see how this implementation works tomorrow.

Best regards,
Kaley.