LBAs in the snow

Friday again! And time for a nice photograph. This photograph was taken about a week ago, showing the Low-Band Antenna aerials in the snow. The time of day was midday, but we were already in kaamos (= polar night) by that stage, hence the twilit landscape.

KAIRA LBA aerials in the snow (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Inverse Days abstract book

The Inverse Days abstract book has been published in the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory report series. It is the report No 61 and available as an ebook (pdf) at Jultika, the University of Oulu e-publication database. A paperback version is also available for the Inverse Days participants.

If you want to find more information on Inverse Days, please visit the event website!

KAIRA for Stellarium

The desktop planetarium "stellarium" is a beautiful way to view the sky from any location and for any time. It also has the added feature of being able to add your own landscapes, thus giving correct horizon views.

Quite some time ago we did this for the KAIRA High-Band Antenna (HBA) array. The result is an Autumnal view of the KAIRA site, from the mid-point of the HBA array.

The view from KAIRA... completely in software! (Image: D. McKay-Bukowski)

You can download the KAIRA HBA landscape (link) for your own version of Stellarium. We plan to create an LBA version sometime in the future.


Ref:  http://www.stellarium.org/

Ice column

In rock formations, when a stalactite meets a stalagmite it forms a rock column. But what about ice? Well most people know that an icicle is the ice equivalent of a stalactite. However, I've not been able to find out if there is an equivalent term for the stalagmite, but made of ice.

However, we did have an ice column form at KAIRA. There was a water trail off the air-conditioning cowling which has frozen into a solid column. And today's photograph is of this.

A long thin ice column (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Snow loading

We've had some pretty heavy snowfalls recently. This puts a lot of weight on structures, including the buildings. It also causes some interesting effects on the roof edges. Today's photographs show what happened at the Biological Station (which is where we have our accommodation for KAIRA).

Heavy snowfall overflowing the roofline (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

The same view, seen from the inside (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

The depth on the roof was probably somewhere between 50 and 60 cm and the weight and slope had caused it to flow over the edge. However, the ice/snow mix had not broken, resulting in a curtain of white which was well over a metre long at its longest point.

SFIR coverage

Hmm... data Monday again. Where did that weekend just go?

We had some visitors from Linz, Austria visit the KAIRA site on Friday. It was great to show them around as they asked lots of interesting questions (and I had a great chance to practice my now-very-rusty Deutsch). Most of the questions were about the imaging, which I've shown countless times on this weblog.

However, there was one screen which went uncommented...

Imaging coverage (Image: D. McKay-Bukowski)

This screen uses old-fashioned ASCII-art to show the coverage of one of our imaging riometry projects (SFIR). The lines refer to the day of the observation (e.g. 20130920 = 20-Jul-2013) and the columns are the hours of the day.

Then, for each position, there is a number from 0 to 9, or a blank or a hash (#). The blanks are where no data has yet been processed. The has shows the hours for which complete processing has occurred. The others show a fraction where 0 = 0-9%, 1 = 10-19%, 2 = 20-29% up to 9 = 90-99%.

As the processing continues, this chart will slowly fill up. However, with huge transforms, massive data sets and a lot of time, this will still take some four to five weeks of processing time on one of the powerful KAIRA computers.

However, it is nice to still see old-fashioned ASCII displays. Reminds me of the old days...

Kaamos

Polar Night (Finnish = kaamos) is the time of the year when the Sun does not rise above the horizon at any point during the day. Kilpisjärvi is now in Polar Night. Although it might seem that this means that the place is pitch dark all the time, this is actually not true.

Close to midday, the Sun may still be below the horizon, however, it does get quite close to it. During this time, the light levels rise to a twilight before sinking back into darkness again.

Midday on 30-Nov-2013 at KAIRA. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

In fact only within a five or so degrees of the poles will the location remain in total darkness for more than 24 hours. Astronomical twilight begins when the Sun rises above 18 degrees below the horizon.

Despite the midnight sun in Summer and huge spans of twiilight, the sun never rises particularly high and so the incident light and warmth remains marginal... hence the cooler temperatures.