Take a look at the sky

One of the things that I has caught my attention the most down here at Davis is the amount of beauty and colour that can be found in the sky.  From clouds, sunsets, sunpillars to auroras. 

 

Cirrus clouds.

Sunsets are quite spectacular down here at Davis.  It's amazing how many different colours come through.  Here are a couple of examples.

Both of these are overlooking the exact location.  Even the same sunset can project so many different colours.
Another phenomena that can be seen down here are sun pillars.  These are normally only seen around the Arctic or Antarctic or at high altitudes.  This is one example seen only yesterday.  Unfortunately my camera does not do it justice for how spectacular this looked.

Sun Pillar

Caused by ice crystals in the sky, it gives the effect of sun shining like a torch directly up into the sky.

Along with sun pillars are sun dogs.  I've yet to see one but I'm keeping a look.

Sun Dog from the AAD website

They are in simple a halo around the sun but seen on the horizon and they give the effect of three sun pillars.

 An example of a halo.

Now that we have more darkness we have all been hanging out for another phenomena that can only be seen at both ends of the world.  These are Auroras.  My first one I saw was spectacular.  I also realised that this is really the only time down here that you see green down here.

Aurora over Davis (Photo courtesy of Andy Burgess)

These have been another highlight of my trip to Antarctica.  Watching these gets the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.  The pictures that you see of these are good, but watching the movements of these is awesome.  The speed that they can move and the way that they snake and flare is surreal.  Auroras are the result of the emissions of photons in the Earth's upper atmosphere above 80 kms from ionized nitrogen atoms regaining an electron, and oxygen and nitrogen atoms returning from an excited state to ground state. They are ionized or excited by the collision of solar wind particles being funneled down and accelerated along the Earth's magnetic field lines.  (Wikipedia).

Scientist down here are also studying the atmosphere with great interest.  One of the ways they do it is by use of a giant laser.  Called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)  data from the laser can be used to give information such as temperatures, wind direction speed even analyse the gases found up to about 85km.

  

LIDAR Building

Quite spectacular to look at and brilliantly bright it seems to go forever.  Unlight cheap laser pointers this laser has very little divergance.  This means that the beam width is only a tiny bit wider the further you are away from it.  The LIDAR at Davis comes out at 40mm and at 100km the width is about 10m. 

 

The data is collected by the backscatter of light seen by two telescopes next to the beam.

Other people that look at the sky with a lot of interest down here are the Meteorological staff.  Yesterday I had the opportunity to release a met balloon.

 

Me releasing the balloon

At the end of the balloon is a little box called a radiosonde that sends data back to the met station.  From here they plot a chart of the temperatures and winds up to about 100,000 ft.  Keeping an eye on the weather is vitally important for all of our operations down here.  Conditions can change so rapidly.  A good example of this is seen in the contrast between the picture above taken yesterday and the pictures below taken this morning.