As Friday night approached, she wrote an advertisement to send out to her friends and even was able to get the museum to give them a discounted group rate. Once they were all at the museum they all pilled into the tent and Kathryn did a wonderful job at answering questions and giving a bit more insight into the movies.
Friday night at the Montshire was amazing. We had a decent crowd and there were people in the fort/tent all night long. The tent was very cute inside, but there are definitely areas for improvement. Although the "screen" was big enough, it would have been nice to have it a bit bigger with the projector farther back. Granted this was the only place we could have placed it, so nothing we could have done about it. It would have also been nice to have it more dome like so that it would look a bit more inviting from the outside. However, for putting this together within a weeks time, I think we did really well! We also had the bonus of being able to set up in the Montshire's Dynamic Earth exhibit which is exactly where we fit in! It was fantastic! One of the best parts of the night though was watching one of BARREL's undergrads explain the movies to her friends. She had helped out with the videos making sure the content were accessible to a wide audience. As Friday night approached, she wrote an advertisement to send out to her friends and even was able to get the museum to give them a discounted group rate. Once they were all at the museum they all pilled into the tent and Kathryn did a wonderful job at answering questions and giving a bit more insight into the movies. The event was three hours long but the time passed by very quickly. Before I knew it, it was time to pack everything up and say good bye to the Montshire. We hope that this won't be the last collaboration as we had a wonderful time and I bet we can do even better if we aren't also focused on the campaign :).
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We're not even a month into the campaign and we've seen some amazing stuff. The last two weeks were filled with excitement, disappointment, surprises and lots and lots of meetings. January 2014 started off with a bang, almost literally. The Sun started flaring so the first week was filled with some great space weather events for us to study. For most of this time we have had 5 -6 payloads aloft with great coverage across the entirety of Antarctica. Below you can see the path the balloons have taken from the first one launched on Dec. 27th 2013 to Jan. 10th 2014. By January 3rd we were seeing some amazing agreement between what was observed in space by the Van Allen Probe Satellites and the X-rays observed by BARREL. These results alone will produce lots of fruitful science and help to improve our understanding of how Hiss, Chorus, and EMIC waves along with other sources of loss in the plasmasphere can ultimately affect the loss of electrons in the radiation belts. Speaking of Hiss, you might be wondering why it is called that. It's quiet literal, if you were to input these waves into your radio, like one does with radio waves, they sound like a Hiss. These are a subset of a group of plasma waves called Whistler mode waves... Again this is quiet literal, they all sound a bit like someone whistling. You can find audio clips of these at the University of Iowa physics site.
Time to get back to work! The campaign is still going on, and lots of work to do. Next Friday at the Montshire museum they are opening their doors after hours for their Adult Night "Montshire Unleashed". There will be beverages and nibbles available from the Norwhich in. So grab a Jasper Murdock and come sit "under the stars" with BARREL. Check out our preview of what we'll be showing on the BARREL Blog. Hope to see you all there!
It has been awhile. Since I last wrote I feel like we've been going non stop. There was MiniGEM and AGU. Then of course the BARREL teams made it to the ice and we have been back into the swing of the campaign. I think Thanksgiving may have also taken place in there. Either way there has been a lot of flying and a lot of science. The American Geophysical Union's (AGU) fall meeting is always in San Francisco and is always a big meeting. It's overwhelming. This year there were moron than 22,000 scientist at the meeting and I don't think I had a moment where there weren't at least two places where I wanted to be. There have been years where I've rarely made it to a talk as all my time was spent meeting up with people individually talking about research papers in progress, possible job opportunities, or speaking about possible future collaborations. Scattered throughout the meeting are also secondary meetings. This year Leslie and I met with the FIREBIRD group to discuss coordination with them during this years campaign. BARREL also joined in the Data Workshop where the Van Allen Teams and BARREL grabbed tables in the poster session and were around to answer questions about our data and how to interpret it correctly. Of course amid all the other meetings and discussions I also gave my first AGU talk. I was so incredibly nervous. Normally I don't mind and even enjoy giving talks, but that crowd of people, all of whom are normally very friendly and easy to talk to, was just terrifying. There was no reason why it should be terrifying, I would gladly give a talk at any of their home institutions, but when you put all these experts together in one room, many of whom I hope to some day work for or with, they become a big body of scariness. Granted they also make you stand on a stage with what feels like a two story projection of your talk, so any of those little things in the plots that you were hoping to hide, any spelling mistakes, any poor color choices in your figures, are very easily seen by everyone including those in the back. All in all I think I did okay. Now that the first one is over, I'm hoping that the next time I get to give an AGU talk I will be much more relaxed and can remind myself that these are all the people whom I know and enjoy working with. One of the benefits of going to AGU is that it is in San Francisco. The California academy of sciences is in San Francisco and every Thursday night they have NiteLife. They open up the museum to anyone 21years and older and the place turns into a bit of a club. There are food and drinks and you can wander around the museum looking at all the exhibits. This year we made it there in time to go through the rainforest and see a planetarium show. Although the entire museum is always fascinating, the aquarium bits are my favorite. They have a tank where you can touch starfish and other odd animals. They have alligator gar fish, they have an albino alligator, there are sting rays. They have tons of animals that almost seem to glow in the dark. There are fish from small to large, but none of these capture my attention like the jellyfish. Although they have all these different types of jellyfish I always seem to take more photos of this one group. They're just mesmerizing. Most of the teams going to Antarctica left straight from AGU to the ice. This year they flew instead of taking the ship. This meant that they got down to the ice sooner than last year and we were able to launch shortly after Christmas, although we almost had a launch on the 24th, but the ground weather was too bad for a launch. However this meant that we have a Christmas where no one had monitor the payloads 24/7. Speaking of Christmas, I was able to go back to WI for a week or so and see my nephew. He is a cutie! And smart but I might be a bit biased. Going back home, even if it's a working holiday, quite literally, is always fun. WI is a winter wonderland. Snowy and bright and beautiful. Not long after Christmas we had our first launch. December 27th 2013 the Halley team was able to launch payload 2T. Since then we have launched two more payloads, one each from Halley and SANAE. Every day we hope to launch more if the ground weather conditions are good.
I had forgotten how much time is taken up by the campaign. All these little things seem to add up quickly. Every morning I run a program to take the locations of our balloons from the night before creating kml files which can be looked at using google Earth. Then I go and look at what the space weather looked like over the last 24 hours, what BARREL saw since the day before, and any other real time instruments that are easily viewed. Then I gather all this and a bit more info into a daily e-mail to send off to people on the BARREL team, the Van Allen team, and other satellite and ground based groups. We then meet up and decide if we should try to collect or download any high resolution data. So this doesn't sound like too much, check a couple of websites, run a quick program, write an e-mail, have a telephone call. Somehow this tends to also add in numerous other e-mails and meetings. Granted I'm also trying to continue my research on a few of last years events and stuff left over from my PhD thesis. All these things seem to add up. Just in the last few days we've had some great space weather. There have been some wonderful substorms and some large precipitation events. They look like very exciting events to study. The Sun continues to look promising for some more space weather in the next few days! Really I can't complain. We might be busy but that is a very good thing. We're off to a great start with the campaign and I can't wait to see what else comes are way. Happy belated holidays and Happy New Year! |
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