Jupiter!

Well, a second bright shiny appeared in our sky today. Jupiter finally became visible, and it was neat to see a little point of light like that again. I remember standing in Christchurch the first night back, in a narrow alleyway by the arts center behind Dux Delux, and looking up and seeing my first star in about 5 months peek through some broken clouds in the little strip of sky sandwiched between the buildings. We'll see plenty of stars in the coming months, and it will be awesome to get reacquainted with the southern constellations once again, like I got to on the tall ship sailing to Easter Island last year.

Speaking of other interesting things in the sky, if it were a bit darker we'd likely have had some seriously intense auroras the last couple days. With some newly developed sun spots there has been a lot of activity picked up on a number of my projects. The VLF has been sounding different, and that's probably for the first time I'm getting to hear a much more clear version of the auroral hiss phenomenon. I guess I'll be expected to let folks (inside) know when there are auroras in the sky to go photograph. We won't be able to see out the windows, since we put blinds up to keep our stray light from the living spaces from interfering with a lot of the sky cameras and photometers the will be studying what is going on in the heavens during the long Antarctic night.