06 July 2010

Longyearbyen Science!

Today was the first day I actually saw the sun. The past three days have been overcast and dreary, but today dawned bright and beautiful. I woke up at 4:30 and decided to go for a run around 5:00. I was able to see the sun 'rise' from behind some of the hills while I went up to the northernmost church and sundial. I didn't have my camera with me then, but I'll go up later this evening to get some pictures. It is quite breathtaking here when I can actually see everything. I can see why so many tourists come to visit.



I went up to attend to the Longyearbyen coil system today. I met Fred Sigernes at UNIS and we drove up the mountain to the aurora station. He didn't know if we would be able to make it all the way up in the car, but we decided to try. We made it past the mine that mines all the coal for the local power plant, we made it by the incoherent scatter radar used for aurora studies, and we made it past two cars of tourists who crossed a road closed sign before the snow was too deep to go in the car. (The locals who are here to work for UNIS dessert the island in the summer when all the tourists arrive. The locals who leave are called Svalbard Indians because they are nomadic.) Instead, we drove this up:



I didn't quite catch the Norwegian name for it, but I called it the indestructible military buggy thing. Take that snow, take that holes in the road, we have THIS thing to get us up the mountain. And up we did go.



Beautiful!

The system is Longyearbyen had a battery that died. Which means that every time the system restarted, the system date was reset to 1 Jan 1999. We pull the system date for the file names, so this has been a problem, with a work around, but it would be nice if the battery could be replaced. Which I did, with my mad soldering skillz.

Old Battery:


New Battery:


There is a superficial mark on the side from where I had a squeezed it with the crescent wrench to hold in place while I soldered.

I am a sucker for the macro shot of just about anything.


I was freaked out about halfway through when I saw this:


I thought the power had been turned back on somehow despite everything being unplugged, but it was the directional lamp I was using that lit up the buttons. Whew!

It appears that everything is function again. Hopefully changing the battery fixed our issue. We will see when the system resets tomorrow.

I don't think that I mentioned that it is expected for everyone to remove their shoes when entering hotels, university, museums, etc.



Sometimes there will be inside shoes (think sandals or slippers) that guests can use. It keeps the floor looking nice. I had to walk through the snow to do a visual check on our coils and when I got back to the building, my shoes were covered in wet and gross which then was deposited all over the entry way floor. I usually don't wear my shoes inside anyway and think the idea is fantastic.

As you can see, I'm not in Ny-Alesund. The package of coils we had shipped did not arrive until after my plane was supposed to leave on Monday. I will be leaving on Thursday to go install a new system. Hopefully the nice weather will hold for a few more days.

I'm off to try Svalbar this evening. Hopefully I can find something good to eat!

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