The Kjell Henricksen Observatory

Hihi,

I'm behind on posting again! Will try to get better at writing these things.

From the 30th January to the 2nd February our class did some field work at the Kjell Henkrikson Observatory (KHO). We went from 5pm to varying degrees of lateness (the latest being around 3.30am), but thankfully we had no lectures during the day. It was quite tiring and very long hours to be working, but it was a cool experience to have.

To get there we had to take the car part way (about 15 minutes driving) and then the belt wagon for about 10 minutes. The belt wagon is a weird machine a bit like a tank, that feels like a rollercoaster but without the fun.

Belt wagon banter. Bottom image credit to KHO/UNIS

At KHO it was quite cold (especially on the first day as the heating was broken) and we had to wear fashionable indoor sandals to help with static shocks and keep our feet off the cold floor. KHO houses 30 instrument rooms that are owned by different scientific companies throughout the world. The instruments are light sensitive and so we had to be very careful with torches, and even had to drive the final stretch of the journey in the belt wagon with no head lights on. A lot of doors we weren't allowed to open either in case the light from the hallway damaged the equipment. This would cost hundreds of thousand of pounds to fix in some cases, so we were very careful! The power in Svalbard can be a bit unreliable, and this can cause problems with the instruments too, so in one room there were hundreds of large batteries as back up power, which would keep the building running for two days, if necessary.

During our week we learned lots about the various instruments there, including all-sky cameras, photometers and spectrometers. Below is a picture of Dag (our lecturer) with the Meridian Scanning Photometer (MSP), which scans the sky over the magnetic meridian and measures the intensity of typical wavelengths of light that the aurora gives off. We had to calibrate this several times, and did an absolute calibration on the final night. The absolute calibrations (which we also did for three spectrometers) were scary because they won't do it again until next year, so if we messed up we messed up a years worth of data! We were heavily supervised, however, and all seemed to go well.

The MSP. Behind all those wires is a rotating mirror that scans along the magnetic meridian.

We also had the task of predicting the aurora, which can only really be done 2-3 hours ahead of time. And while we got the time right, we were't expecting the light shows that we got, two days in a row!

Here is a time lapse I made of one of the substorms that occurred during the week, that I will be doing my project on. Image credit goes to KHO/UNIS (images used with permission).

Finally, we signed the guest book, and got to have Friday off as we'd gathered so much data in the other four days! This was very much needed to get our sleeping patterns back ready for lectures on Monday.

Making our mark! I drew in the bear during a break

Other blogs to follow as I try to catch up,

Emma