Sunrise at Our Home

I finally had the chance to sleep in after one of the longest and hardest work weeks I have ever had. I think I worked an average of 16 hours a day this week, including the weekend. So I woke up a little after 9 and went outside to photograph the sunrise. It's not all that exciting, I know, but these things last for hours here and they are really very pretty. I have a new set on flickr called "our home" where you can find all the pictures I've taken at (and from) our place.


The view from the side of our house the morning after a nice snowfall.


Our front porch (we still need to buy a snow shovel) with the first sunlight hitting the trees.


Snowy street.

Murphy Dome at Nighttime

I have a lot of new pictures I would like to share, I hope you don't mind. Jason and Alex, fellow grad students, and I drove up to Murphy Dome to try to photograph the aurora. We barely got much of a show, and it only lasted for about 15 minutes, but still managed to take many great photos. When we first arrived, about two hours after sunset, we had a very nice view of Denali as it was sticking up into the clouds. The color in the sky was incredible. The Sun sets at such a low angle, that it stays light out for hours after it dips below the horizon.


Denali after sunset from Murphy Dome.


Jason and Alex at the top of Murphy Dome, about 30 minutes northwest of Fairbanks.

At the top of Murphy Dome is a giant radar tower operated by the Army Air Force. There was once an Air Force Base in the 50's and multiple radars for use with the nike missile system. At night it makes a nice photo subject, especially when it's inside a 22 degree halo from the full moon. The back-side is almost totally open, and it's apparently a little over 2900 vertical feet. There used to be a tow rope in place, but it is now gone. I have now decided that tele-skis are moving up on the priority list. There was about 6-10 inches of snow that we were trudging through, but still quite a few blueberry bushes sticking through, so it's not quite ski-able yet.



Even though it was slightly overcast and the full moon was incredibly bright, the northern lights still made an appearance, albeit brief. It actually must have been pretty bright to be able to see it in these conditions. It was even visible within the moon's halo for a few minutes.


Full moon shining bright with the green aurora appearing behind clouds.


Aurora, again showing behind the clouds. There are more pictures from this evening up on flickr.

I'm sure Jason has taken many great pictures as well. I'll post a link to them as soon as they're available.

Yesterday: Sunrise to Sunset

Yesterday the Sun rose at 9:00 am Alaska time. Every day here is a totally new play on the lighting over the Tanana Valley and the Alaska Range. Yesterday was exceptional: clear, cold, bits o' fog, great color, and great illumination of the Alaska Range. Then at night the tallest mountains were illuminated. Four of us grad students stood outside in the cold for 20 minutes watching. Click on any of the photos to go to my flickr page.


The Sun, still rising over the western hills is inching closer to the southern Alaska Range every day.

Morning light on the Alaska Range. It was a little too overcast to see detail, but the lighting on the clouds was good.


Sunset over the Alaska Range: 6:10pm Alaska time

Salcha, Harding Lake, Chena Lake, Chena River and North Pole

Kate and I went for a drive again, this time driving southeast on the Alaska Highway.  This is the same route we took into Alaska, but it was fairly overcast on the day we arrived so we didn't see much.  On a clear day, like today the scenery is quite different;  The views of Mt. Hayes and the Alaska Range are phenomenal.  We stopped a few times along the Tanana River to take a few photos.  It was very windy, very cold.  There are already large chunks of ice floating downstream.


Alaska Range shadowing over the freezing Tanana River.

We turned around at one of the Scenic views and made our second stop on the way back at Harding Lake. This will be a great place to visit in the summer. The campsites looked really nice and the lake is beautiful. There were some fires smoldering just before reaching the lake. It looked like a controlled burn (or at least a well managed one).


Harding Lake, just south of Salcha, AK and north of Delta Junction. Great views of the Alaska Range and surrounding hills. Supposedly there is good fishing here too.



Leftover burn at Harding Lake.  It looked like about 5 acres was left smoldering.

We went on to check out the knotty shop in Salcha. It's kind of a giant Alaska gift shop. There's a lot of touristy stuff, but also a lot of pretty nice Alaska made crafts. Watch out for the pure Alaskan gold vial (made in China). Then, while on our way back to Fairbanks we stopped along the Chena River. This was built by the Army Corp of Engineers as part of the Chena River Lakes Flood Control Project after a devastating flood hit Fairbanks in 1967. We spent some time exploring Chena Lake and the Chena River too. Most of the pictures are already on flickr, and I'll be putting many of them in my Alaska page.


A really good reason to live in Alaska. The Alaska Range never gets tiring to look at. Here's a new vantage point from on top of the Chena River Flood Control dam. There's a nice park here, with lots of bike trails.

Northern Lights

The aurora stopped by again tonight and I was camera ready. With the help of spaceweather.com it's pretty easy to stay on top of things. The statistical auroral oval provided by NOAA lets me know when there's a good chance of seeing the lights so I can get ready. Even with tools provided from satellites and from magnetic flux measurements, it still takes some patience. Most of the time the light is very diffuse, just a dim glow in the sky or behind the trees.  Other times it looks like this:



Oh, and there were new colors tonight. Orange! It was really visible too, but I wasn't fast enough and the optics weren't good enough to really photograph it well. Regardless, I managed to get quite a few photos tonight. I'll keep posting pictures on my flickr page: new aurora gallery.

Statistical Auroral Oval provided by NOAA. If you live in the northern U.S. you should bookmark this to see when you may have a good chance of viewing the northern lights.

Plugging for the little guys

I want to start advocating for the use of more opensource software.  There is a whole philosophy with a lot of programmers that software should be freely distributed, many of them work incredibly hard to put together packages that anyone can use for free.  Then there are a few developments that stand out far above the rest.

Tonight I want to tell you about stellarium.  This is a planetarium software that shows you anything you want and more about the night sky.  You can fast forward or go back in time, or go to any location and see what the night sky looks like.  This is absolutely fantastic for anyone with kids or anyone who just wants to get familiar with the night sky.  Panning is as easy as dragging, it shows constellations, planets, and has a huge library of objects in the sky along with information and sometimes images of that object.  It is incredibly easy to use and is available for windows, mac, and linux.  Go check it out.

Screenshot of Stellarium. Go out and get it here.

Good Morning

Morning sunrise (9:13am, official sunrise today occurred at 8:47am) and Otis looking the wrong way.

It was 10 degrees [F] this morning, 11 with the wind chill? So, the actual temperature at our house must have been near zero. Weather forecasting here is a little different than in the lower 48. So next time you get mad at the weatherman, just be thankful you're not in Alaska. It's really not the fault of forecasters; you can drive 10 minutes in any direction and find temperatures 20 degrees apart, clouds and snow instead of sun or maybe rain, etc.

Sorry I couldn't post much of anything this week, here is a short update:

Despite having slightly shorter Quantum and Electrodynamics assignments, this was a tougher week than normal. Maybe its due to the fact that all of the physics teaching assistants are on the 4th week in a row of 80+ hour weeks, maybe its the fact that last weekend didn't lend itself to taking my typical 1 day with no schoolwork, but regardless it was a hard week. Teaching is time-consuming, grading is monotonous and time-consuming, homework is hard, classes are hard to stay awake in, time to eat is scarce, and everyone is severely deprived of sleep. Tomorrow will be a full day off. I will do something fun and write about it.

We had our first snow this week (previous post), and our first dog-sled encounter that you can read about on Kate's blog.  We also managed to get out for a while and explore the University's trail system.  Just north of campus UAF owns 1100 acres of land that is filled with trails.  In the summer the dry trails are open for walking.  In the winter there are snowshoe and skiing trails.  Many of the ski trails groomed and are kept lit so that even in the dark winters we can get out and ski.

Supposedly the tip of a coronal mass ejection was supposed to give a glancing blow to the Earth's magnetosphere yesterday so I got a little aurora excited, but nothing happened. It's been too cloudy recently to see much of anything. The falls (winter) in Fairbanks are always cloudy, the springs are usually sunny, so the best time for viewing is the spring. Maybe it will stay clear a little longer than the forecast says so I can get some more pictures.

Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Fairbanks!

Today is October 11th!  The temperature forecast for Dover, NH is 62 [deg F];  Stillwater, MN will be 76;  Cincinnati, OH will be about 86.  Here in Fairbanks it will be 31 and guess what!  It snowed!



I had to go for a little walk around campus to take some pictures and enjoy the air. Here are some whale bones on palettes.



In the lower 48, when you walk around and stumble upon a bunch of whale bones on palettes, you say, "what the . . .", but here in Alaska you say, "Hey, I found some whale bones. . . and they're on palettes". Also, we noticed that all the stores have Christmas stuff out already?!

The driving is pretty tough though. They throw some gravel down on the road, but that's it. We are going to need to get some studded tires, because I don't think snow tires will do much on this ice.

I walked out on some of the UAF trails. There are tons of lighted ski and snowshoe trails and a little ski hut with a wood stove. Can't wait!



Not the ski hut. Old Russian trading post near the museum.

Good Morning

At 7:40 am this morning there was no sun. Dawn had begun about 40 minutes earlier and now while I am writing this at 8:01 am it is still dawn. The Sun won't rise for another 24 minutes at 8:25 am and even then it won't shine down on Fairbanks from over the eastern hills for a few minutes after that.



Between September 25th and 26th we began having less daylight than central New Hampshire. Now, two weeks later, we are almost an hour behind. In 12 days the length of our day will be shorter than winter solstice in NH. Two days after that we will have less daylight than St. Paul, MN on the winter solstice. We continue to lose about 6 minutes per day until Dec. 21.

On that day we will have 3 hrs and 41 minutes of daylight. The Sun will be lower than most of our treetops, so we will only see glimpses of it through the trees at our house. Go outside and look at the horizon. Hold your thumb up in the air with the base of it at the horizon (with your arm extended). The tip of your thumb will be about the height of the sun on a Fairbanks Solstice.

Stay warm folks.

Recent photos

Some of you may have noticed that the quality of my flickr photos have gotten a little better recently. It doesn't have anything to do with my photography skills. You could throw a camera at a tree in this state and it would snap off two unbelievable photos. Rather, this is due to new equipment donated by my awesome cousin Max. Everyone should thank him by buying him a beer.

My top priority, next to getting snow tires and lots of stuff for my wonderful wife, is purchasing even newer (Nikon) equipment.  Hopefully that will happen this winter so I can be ready for the spring-time Aurora in Fairbanks.

Thanks for coming!

Aurora Tonight!

And it was a great show. It lasted about one hour, but was only really bright, and I mean REALLY bright for about 10 or 15 minutes. I've seen the whole sky lit up pretty bright a few times, but for about two minutes tonight we had the strongest ribbon I have seen yet. Kate finally had the chance to see it too, since it wasn't two in the morning. Here are a couple of the better shots I got tonight. (It was so bright I shot with an iso 100 and used a little longer shutter speed.) Hopefully more will come soon.



Click to go to flickr page

Elliott Highway

Kate and I took a drive up the Elliott Highway today. It starts in Fox, just north of Fairbanks and ends at the Manley Hot Springs after crossing the famous Dalton Highway. I had hoped that we would make it to the Dalton, but the road got a little too icy at around mile 50. It was beautiful anyway. We saw the White Mountains for the first time and are already getting excited to go snowshoeing and/or skiing there in the winter/spring. I've posted most of the pictures on flickr. I started a set called "This is Alaska!". That's where most of my photos will be posted from now on. There's another set of "Lee and Kate in Alaska!" If you want to see how grizzled I'm getting.



The drive was also a reminder of how remote it really is out here. Fairbanks is big enough that it is easy to forget we are really out in the middle of nowhere, and really, really far north. The black ice on the road even though it was 50 [deg F] out was a good reminder of the fact that we are only a couple degrees south of the Arctic Circle.

Moon and Aurora

So I walked outside a few nights ago when the moon was starting to wane from a bright, full moon. All of a sudden the moonlit clouds started doing a little shimmering dance across the sky and I realized they weren't moonlit clouds at all, but it was the Aurora. The aurora must have been quite bright to show up during such a bright moonrise.

Keep surprising me nature!