Damn cold but finally got some good pics

Firstly, the first group left on Tuesday, a great bunch of people but was quickly followed by the Earth Watch group that came in late Tuesday and Wednesday. A most eclectic group, Russian, Turk, Japanese, Indian, New Orleanians, British, Canadian and USA - I think I covered them all. Many are here through their company which in 4 cases is Shell Oil. I'll have to get more bios. I sat in on the first meeting where the leader went over the general areas of interest: for approximately 12 years Earth Watch has been monitoring established monitoring stations for snowpack information and also other areas to determine tree growth and recruitment (are the tree lines expanding northward). The snowpack methodology involves digging snow pits and measuring such variables as temperature gradients, crystal structure, water content, etc. They'll be going out every morning and afternoon for about 9 days in rather cold and windy weather: you should think twice before signing up for this one! But everyone seemed pretty positive when they got back today after their afternoon of training. There are 15 of them plus two leaders, btw.

Thursday another group of about 24 shows up for the northern lights and they'll be here until Tuesday. More names to learn, for sure, but they all have interesting stories.

So, tonight as we were almost finished cleaning up after dinner, Roger "Starman" came rushing in to say the show was on. Linda was on to it immediately bringing down the camera and tripod. Wearing only sneakers and a tee shirt, I threw on my jacket and bomber hat and glove liners to go outside into the approximate -9F with -33F windchill. No face protection. You do not want to be facing the wind for long! So I focused on the moon, took a few pics, then refocused on Jupiter which gave me sharper pics. You need to occasionally refocus your infinity point as your camera does the old shrinkage trick which all us guys hate. Most of the pics have a building or antenna in them for visualization although Linda prefers not to have them in it. So I'll be taking a variety of pics, of course. After a number of pics (f1.8, ISO 400, exposure time 8 seconds) I was freezing, especially my hands which only had liners and my face whenever I faced into the wind - quickly learned to press the shutter and turn away from the wind. But it appeared I was getting much better pics than the last two times. See for yourself. And I'm sure there will be more and better to come.

Next I have to go out into the tree line to get pics with trees in the foreground which should be quite lovely.

I'll have to start talking about life as a volunteer soon. Much easier being a volunteer at DEP, believe me!

And I'll leave you with a picture of Alex and Vince, two of the young guys from the first group who were quite helpful and fun.They went out three times to take pics! Crazy boys!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone (tomorrow).

Tired volunteer going to bed - after I check out more NLs as I just got a knock on the door from Starman.