Day, Night, Pitch, & Roll

The Roger Revelle is steaming southwest; we're still about a week away from our first station, which will be as close to Antarctica as sea ice will permit. That's when all the action/science begins. Until then, I'll continue to assume that scientists and sailors are only different in that scientists look and behave like nerds.

As we travel further south, the craziness of the polar regions becomes increasingly apparent...
-- Days get longer: by the time we reach our first station, the sun will set for only 4 hours a night.
-- I've already mentioned the rough seas, but when I wrote that post, we were experiencing only 5 to 15 degrees of pitch and roll. These days we typically roll about 20 degrees... about half an hour ago we hit a big one (best guess is 25 degrees) and everyone fell over. Haha!
-- The pictures below are of the Aurora Australis, or the Southern Lights. Forgive the blurriness; the ship was rolling and long exposures were necessary. In the third photo, a star traces the roll of the ship. I don't know what causes auroras... I used to think it was because of charged ions from solar wind being drawn by the earth's magnetosphere crashing into the atmosphere... but it's probably just caused by the Russians.

Oh another amazing thing: in the city, it's easy to forget that moonlight and starlight are significant sources of illumination... being on the bridge at night is sort of a fantastic thing. At first you can't see anything at all, and then you think you see something, but no it's just your watch, and then all of a sudden you can see for miles and miles around.