Things Get Better and Better...and Windy

Dr. Herman: Late last night, I was up doing my homework (yes, blogging takes time, as well as data processing, uploading pictures, catching up on email, etc.) and one of the "big-time" researchers was in the hallway. I said hi, and he said he was going out to watch the auroral lights, or the "northern lights." I went down and got James, and we went with him to the "beach."

It was cold and windy, and windy as well as cold. And did I mention it was windy?

But we settled in, lying down on the snow banks (you don't really sink into these) and looked up at the midnight sky. And yes, there they were.

Pale, slowly-undulating streams of slightly green light, crossing from one side of the sky to another. These lights are caused by charged particles that come crashing into Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere both from our sun and from sources far outside our own little solar system and well beyond. They crash into our atmosphere, losing their energy and dying in a cascade of particles and radiation that reveal their passing in these tenuous night streamers.

Our companion was a geology/geophysics professor from Fort Hayes State University (Kansas). He had a very nice digital camera and got some very nice pictures. James got some pics, but my camera just couldn't handle the dark and could not be coaxed into a long exposure. Oh well. But it just didn't matter. I think we stayed out for an hour, long enough to get painfully cold, but not long enough to care that we were that cold. You just don't see this every day, and frankly most people don't ever see this.

Before breakfast this morning I did my usual email thing, and then went back to work on the data. I produced a better image, showing more detail, and (fortunately) saved it. Then I decided to upload the data on to several places on the RU servers just for paranoia's sake. If my computer died, all of our work would not be lost. So naturally, upon starting the ftp process, the hotel's (it's not really a hotel, more like a cheap dorm) wireless network decided to go down and take my computer with it. Long story short: 45 minutes later, rebooting in every mode I could think of (several times safe mode even) I finally got the thing back working. And I quickly put the data in about 57 different places on 12 different computers. Well, not quite that many, but you get the idea.

We spent the morning talking with an archaeologist up here who's working on some burial and other traditional sites. Very productive meeting. And, it looks like it could lead to a collaboration between RU and her organization. Keep your fingers crossed.

We got back out on the ice after lunch. Notice a theme here? Lotsa ice time.

With the wind trying to frostbite every exposed part of us, it took an hour to lay out additional flags for a 100-meter-by-6-meter grid so that we could go for the big fish, a 3-dimensional scan.

Did I mention the wind was bad? I think the wind chill was about 50 or 60 below zero. No kidding. Some of the skin on my nose is peeling now, thanks to Friend Wind.

We went back inside to get thawed out, and then get our equipment yet again. Back out into the cold.

Did I mention the wind?

Took 2 hours to get the half the data. It was around 5:00 anyway, and we were having this little, bitty wind problem, so we packed it in. Again, the data was plentiful and everything was working perfectly. Except the wind. Urgh.

Ate at the cafeteria with a local radio host, and then he interviewed me and James. And for those of you keeping track, yes, we mentioned "Radford University" more than once. So for those of you in Admissions, if you get applicants from northern Alaska, then we must have spoken clearly and well!

But after the interview finally came the moment of truth. We went to one of the labs where one of the "big-time" scientists was working. We took our scan in (the one on the Physics Club website) so that we could compare what we got with our remote sensing method with their drilling and stick-in-the-snow by-hand methods. And lo and behold, their direct numbers and our data matched extremely well! And with ours, you could see features in great detail, in way more details than they had. And, they had spent several days getting their data on only 125 meters of their test line.

With a working transmitter, we got the data along 300 meters in 2.5 hours.

Can you say "Score!!"??? Yes, we were excited. But, we were careful to not let it show embarrassingly to this person. However, I can tell you that this one data set made the trip scientifically worthwhile. It's the "proof-of-concept" that we were looking for, and we had it in our hands.

And on several other computers. And, in Ohmy's memory still. So naturally tomorrow we're going for the proverbial icing on the cake, going after the unprecedented data that will allow us to reconstruct a 3-D image.

And did I mention the wind today????