Monday, June 21, 2010

Blue moon?

We now have a waxing moon here at the bottom of the planet, and its light brings a welcome change from the last several weeks of stumbling around in the dark. I was noticing the color of the moon on the snow today, and it sure looks blue to me...sort of. The landscape under that reflected sunlight, if photographed with a camera that can take a long enough exposure, will look pretty much like it does under direct sunlight. The snow reflects over 90% (i.e. has a high albedo) of the incident light, which helps make moon-up times such a welcome respite from the klutziness of the darker times.

It is also interesting to see how the drifting has developed over the last couple weeks. One drift out in the Dark Sector seems to have gone from knee to chest-high since I saw it last. I've been walking over it in the dark and could tell it was bigger, but I did not guess it would have experience such a growth spurt. The drift by the "vertical tower"/"beer can" of the Elevated Station keeps creeping closer to the building, and is currently pretty steep, which at least makes for a fun slide down, if the climb up is a bit more strenuous.

Today was a bit quieter than of late, which was pleasant. I made use of the lull to do some work writing in updates for more of my science project manuals. It is a big project, but one I could in no way fail to do, given how much help they can be in the turnover to an inexperience replacement. My early start on these documents will hopefully pay dividends in conserved sanity, via reduced workload, toward the end of the season.

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
~Carl Sagan

2 comments:

Teacher said...

Saw the mid-winter photo. Where are you? (Can't tell with all the hoods.)

Have you thought of time lapse photos of those dunes, I mean drifts?

Pablo (yo) said...

Oh, I expected a picture of that moon....