Rocket Science, Part 1

Well I mentioned in the last post that I would be on a rocket campaign. I've been waiting until we launched the rocket to make an update, but turns out we made it through the whole launch window without favorable conditions to launch. We actually had pretty good science conditions on several nights but the rocket was grounded due to high winds which left a significant probability of blowing out of our intended landing zone. So we're waiting for the Moon to not be so bright then we'll open another window.

The image above is one I took during a night waiting to launch, the three red streaks are weather balloons released to measure the winds. It's a composite of about 40 two minute exposures. I've been thinking about a better way to process star trails for a while, that would preserve the single image 'background' so that the aurora would be detailed and pretty (and, in other situations, would give you stationary foreground foliage even if it's windy) while still allowing the stars to trail over many hours. So you're looking at something like 1.5 hours (~40 exposures) of stars but only 2 minutes (1 exposure) of aurora. What I did was loaded all the images into IDL and calculated the standard deviation on each pixel. I picked a single image to use as a background, then I went through and picked the pixels with a large positive standard deviation, meaning something temporary and bright happened in that pixel (e.g. a star moved through), and replaced that pixel from the background image with the pixel from the brightest single image. The tricky part is I can do the statistics on a single color channel, so if I ignore the green channel the process is blind to the aurora movement. I used the red channel for this example to get the red flares on the weather balloons, but normally I'd probably use the blue channel since there can be significant auroral emissions in red. It still needs some work but I think it's a good start. Eventually I plan to make it into a simple GUI where people can use it without needing to know how to script.

Other than that, we did actually launch a rocket, a small experimental prototype designed by some of the folks here at UAF. Since it was a test it didn't need to launch into an aurora like our typical rockets, so it actually launched in daytime. Here's a shot I got of it going up with the 150mm Sigma lens and the D7000:



And here's a video I took with the new NEX F3 and a 50mm Nikon lens:



I don't know why Flickr isn't offering me the video embed code that it offers for every other video.

Here's a shot of it leaving the launch pad from a camera that was very close, taken by Jeff Rothman:

And click here for an album of it taking off then descending under parachute in the sunset, taken by Mark Conde.

Our next launch window opens on the 24th of this month, so hopefully we'll get the big rocket off the ground without too much trouble this time.

In other news, I got rear-ended by a big truck while waiting for the car in front of me to turn, sandwiched between the two, and my car is probably totaled. So I'm shopping around and I think I'll get a 2014 Subaru Forester. I am disappointed with Subaru for not offering the ridiculously oversized moonroof on manual transmission models.

Toolik Lake

I'm writing from my room at the Toolik Lake Field Station. The temperature here is basically the same it was in Fairbanks, which is a bit surprising, but it was already cold in Fairbanks so I'm not complaining that it's not any colder. This marks my... 6th?... trip above the Arctic Circle. And though the Sun did technically get above the horizon today, the mountains of the Brooks Range to the south were still higher, so I'm calling this as my first day with no sunrise. Here's a timelapse I shot of the mountains with the Sun passing down behind them, just out of view.

Around 6:00pm I was outside and noticed a couple of bright moondogs - sundogs except from the Moon instead of the Sun. I've seen them a few times before but it's still unusual enough to be interesting. So as I was looking, I tipped my head back to look up and noticed a circumzenithal arc up near zenith! Now that's new to me! I snapped a few pictures as I watched not only those two things, but also the beginnings of a parhelic (parlunic?) circle, an upper tangent arc, and, after I looked at the picture on a computer, a supralateral arc. Pretty rare things to see from the Moon. Here's a picture:

Work-wise, I had no trouble pulling out the EMCCD camera I'm bringing back to Fairbanks, which was my whole reason for coming up here. All packed up and ready to go:

I tried to film the drive up and do a better job than my previous attempt:

But I think I had some trouble with several things and I'm not sure what I have is worth working with. I may try to film some more on tomorrow's drive back south to Fairbanks, so we'll see. But that wraps up my tasks up here, next I suppose I'll be thinking about rocket launches and heading to Venetie, AK.

Until then.

Back in Alaska... back on the blog?

That's the Prius after ~1.5 months of sitting unattended. I've been out of Alaska since early December but I'm back now. In that time I went to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco where I presented a poster on my time-of-flight calculation, which I'll probably explain in more detail here sometime while organizing my thoughts into a paper to be published. Then I spent the holidays in Arkansas.

I've been thinking for a while that I let this blog go for too long, and other people started pointing it out to me as well, so I'm going to try keeping up with it again. I built an automated all-sky aurora camera, you should click here to see what the sky looks like above Poker Flat RIGHT NOW!!!! Unless it's daytime because the camera only runs at nighttime. But there's a lot of nighttime in the interior this time of year, so your chances are pretty good. So much nighttime, in fact, that I've already worn out the shutter on one of the Nikon D610's used for the project - that's 180,847 photographs in ~1.5 months. Anyway, I intend to do a post or two here about how I set up the automation, so others who are interested can follow along.

Otherwise, I'm heading back up to Toolik Lake on Monday and returning to Fairbanks on Wednesday, weather permitting, so I'm sure I'll post something on that. Then we have a rocket launch window beginning at the end of this month, so I intend to do some behind the scenes rocket posts.

Until then.

Buy my stuff!

Hello dear readers,

I've created a SmugMug website where you can easily order prints of my photos. There are currently about 100 of my best photos from the last two years available, and a select few older ones. More older ones are coming. If you want a print of something that isn't on there, let me know and I'll add it.

Unfortunately it costs $20 a month to keep the site up, so... please buy something :/ I've set the profit margin at 30%, so for every $10 you spend, $7 is actual printing cost and $3 goes into keeping the site available.

Click here to go browse.