Last night at KHO

Okay so tonight was the last night of the AGF-301 fieldwork and unfortunately there was very little aurora to speak of. As with many scientific investigations most of the time was sitting around waiting for something to happen. In the previous few days SDO had predicted that that Earth facing coronal holes would produce some fast solar wind. This, however, did not show up at the L1 point where ACE was taking the reading as over the past few days the solar wind speed and density has dropped significantly.

Anyway… We spent the evening looking through data and Dag taught us how to calculate the current and height of electric flux tubes using the magnetogram data from sites all around the polar cap. When performing this task ourselves, however, we managed to be stumped for almost an hour by simple trigonometry for which we blame our education and not at all our own utter stupidity.
During the evening we did manage to set up the camera for a time lapse of a weak southern auroral arc, and I really mean weak. This gave me the opportunity again to half-load the rifle and be on Polar Bear watch something that is far more daunting without Breeze there with me and when my night vision could possibly pick out a moving object 10m away if we were lucky.

We made it back alive and have some good data from Monday that Stu and I will hopefully work into a good project by April. Finally we get to work with real data that no one else has seen before that is from real instruments. KHO is awesome can’t wait to get the opportunity to go back. Also left a big vanilla custard slice in the fridge, so, I will want that back at some point.