compilerbitch

Hi Folks,

I made it to Devon Island a little over a week ago now. I've not had comms until today because we only just got the Ka-band satellite dish working this afternoon, so this is the first chance I've had to get these out and to catch up on the week's backlog of email.

Windswept

It has been pretty windy here -- up to and just over 30 knots some of the time. It's forecast 60 - 75 in Resolute in a couple of days, which means we'll get hit pretty hard too. Hopefully our tents will survive, but cube law and all that -- double the wind speed, increase the force by a factor of 8. My tent is staked out with enormous tent pegs, fully guyed out, and every peg has a bigass rock sitting on top of it. It's also a brand new Mountain Hardware Trango 3.1, which is designed for nontrivially bad conditions, so I should be OK. I'll be tightening my guy lines and checking the pegs before bed tonight though.

Tributaries

This is an aerial shot from the DHC6 on the flight over from Cornwallis. There was (still is) quite a bit of snow cover that will probably disappear by the end of the arctic summer.

The facilities

These are, um, the facilities. You know, *cough cough*. Actually, you probably don't *want* to know.

Setting up camp

Setting up camp, particularly in the first few days, involves a lot of manual labour. Heavy lifting, moving stuff around, getting things out of storage, setting up electrical and comms systems, getting the heaters going, etc. It takes about a week in total before people other than the core team start arriving.

Sea ice off Devon

These are some odd shapes in the sea ice just off the coast of Devon as we were flying overhead.

River and snow

The addition of snow makes Devon even more photogenic than usual, I think. And oddly moves me to do more colour -- this is rare for me.

Polygon river

Another (gasp) colour landscape. The name comes from the river in the middle (duh) and the fact that the ground either side has a polygonal surface structure. This forms due to expansion and contraction due to freezing, and is also found in the polar regions of Mars.

Pauline

We typically have several local Inuit working in camp. This is Pauline, from Grise Fjord, the northernmost settlement in the world. *waves, if you're reading this!*

Outpost

This is actually the comms tent that houses the satellite equipment and other various raio gear.

On takeoff

On board the Twin Otter, just as the pilots opened the throttles to start the takeoff run. The DHC6 is an amazing aircraft -- older than I am, yet better than anything else at takeoffs and landings on short gravel airstrips, which makes it a mainstay up here in the far north.

On DHC6 Twin Otter before takeoff

This was taken by one of the pilots. It's me with my pelican case full of cameras, sitting on top of a big pelican case full of robot control system. :-)

Illuminati

Definite signs of Illuminati activity. This requires further investigation.

Hold on to your hat

A shot of the weather station's display panel during the last wind storm.

From a window

From the window of the Twin Otter, just as we were crossing the coast of Cornwallis Island on the way to Devon.

Diesel

The semi-permanent work tents are heated by diesel stoves. This barrel feeds the heaters in two tents.

DHC6 Cargo

I was the only passenger on the flight -- the rest of the plane was full of cargo. It is quite amazing what those planes can handle.

Devon coast

I can't wait to get a chance to print this one...

Bitten through fibre

One of the messier bits of setting up camp was the main gigabit fibre from the comms tent to the core, and back out to the office tent had been chewed through by an animal (probably an arctic fox) over the winter. Since it's essentially impossible to repair a fibre, particularly with the equipment we have here, it was necessary to pull it all out and replace it with new cables. It got done, but it was messy and required digging up the conduit because the connectors were too chunky to let themselves be pulled around the 90 degree bends in the pipes.

Around Camp

This is a shot between several of the work tents. You can see the CSA's autonomous Arthur C. Clarke greenhouse project in the background.

So that's it for now -- more as I shoot them!

Just a quick message to say that we arrived safely in Resolute Bay last night. Today is going to be cargo sorting mostly. I'll hopefully be back online a bit this evening. I think the plan is we're going to the island tomorrow, but that's not definite yet.

I'll try to post a few photos later, but for now I have to run to head to Polar Shelf.

This may be my last post for a while. I'm currently in Vancouver, finalising loading the C-130.

Current plan is, we leave early tomorrow morning, takeoff should be around 9am. We're refuelling in Yellowknife, then continuing on to Resolute in one go so I should be there by evening. I may or may not have comms there -- likely yes, but it's possible I won't. I'll be in Res a couple of days, then we'll be heading to Devon Island most likely on Monday and opening camp. Latest news is that we'll most likely not have comms until sometime around mid-July, maybe the 10th but possibly later (or even not at all).

I'll be shooting photos as always, but there may well not be much in the way of updates. Apologies in advance for that, and please don't worry if you don't happen to hear from me.

Zoom!

But I don’t.

You see, I have my own moral compass. This is not an easy path, particularly if you really mean it.

Jesus would have forgiven you…

But I won’t.

Not for this. Not for selling out like that, not for forgetting the basic message of your own religion and giving in to the hatred of the people who would seek to control you.

But, what about Leviticus? What about Paul?

Well, what about them? Leviticus was an extreme homophobe with a bizarre dislike for seafood. Paul was a misogynist. I see no evidence that Jesus was any of those things. What, are you telling me that you don’t believe in Jesus? That you prefer the opinions of a couple of hangers-on (who, it should be said, never met the man Himself?)

Jesus would probably have forgiven you for that, too.

Oh right, it’s in the Good Book.

So who put it there? Was it Jesus?

No, it was the centuries of church leaders who sought to control you and your ancestors.

So why did you let them?

Oh, that’s right. They had a bit of a liking for burning people at the stake for disagreeing with them. Not being burned at the stake is a good plan, in my opinion.

But, this is 2009. No stakes around here. No public crucifixions.

You are allowed your own moral compass. No one is going to burn you at the stake for it. Jesus will still love you.

So, evolve yourself a spine. Do the right thing. Stop listening to the people who would control you through their hatred and your fear.

Do the right thing.

Then, I will forgive you.

My name is Sarah, but I am Other. I am, if you like, cut from different cloth. My archetype had some versioning issues. When god handed out the Normal, I was looking the other way, daydreaming about something more interesting than queuing.

I’m not Other by choice, though my choices have played a part. In some sense, if you’re already Other by dint of the universe declaiming Fiat Weird! at your conception, then adding a few extra Other points doesn’t do much more harm.

Otherness can be entailed in many ways, but at the heart of the matter is that it’s kind-of a Hamming distance from the default, privileged, white, Christian, male, middle class norm. As that distance increases, privilege decreases, and Otherness becomes unavoidable. Ultimately, it’s actually difference in Hamming distance that matters – it’s quite possible to be more Other than Other, and to be more privileged than privileged.

I’m Other as a consequence of quite a few things. My Hamming distance is pretty large. I’m trans, poly, kinky, bi, pagan, female, both queer and genderqueer, bright enough that many people have an issue with it. They are the big ones, but there are more.

Otherness isn’t a special club. There isn’t a secret handshake, or a newsletter. Beyond the bonding that occurs between veterans comparing battle scars, there’s not much in the way of community either. Being Other makes you a specialised taste, so whilst finding love is only made a little harder, finding lovers really is a lot more difficult. Not impossible, just harder. The same goes for finding jobs and housing.

Being Other puts you well down the privilege hierarchy. Stating that fact is typically interpreted as whining. Sure, I’ll whine. I’ll also adopt a characteristic None Shall Pass attitude should anyone try to use their privilege as a way to bully or control me.

Though I do not choose to be Other, I could choose to appear less Other. I could fake my Hamming distance down toward more acceptable levels. I could have chosen to not transition, and kept my perceived cisgendered privilege. No wait – I’d be dead by now if I’d done that. Suicide, most likely. Scratch that one. And, before I transitioned, people read something off about me anyway, so I still had much of the same difficulty. If anything, transitioning made interacting with people easier – for them, more than for me. Being genderqueer for me basically means being OK with not being a standard-issue, cookie cutter stamped out Acme Model 1 woman. I’m female-identified, but I’m not that. Not even close. But, my Hamming distance from cookie cutter Male is far larger, so I deal with what I’ve got. So that one’s not really a choice either, I couldn’t fake it even if I wanted to. I could be in the closet about being queer, poly, bi or kinky, but all that would do is make it even harder for me to find community. I could fake Christianity, but… no wait, I really couldn’t. Most variants would reject me out of hand, some would try to hammer me into a mould in order to crunch down that big old Hamming distance of mine. Some, very few indeed, would accept me with open arms, but there would still be the slight problem that, um, not actually Christian, and I have principles about lying about that kind of thing.

So what’s my point here? What’s the moral lesson to extract from this? What do I Want?

Ultimately, respect is good. It’s always good, and always a good thing to suggest, in the same sense that a doctor telling someone with bizarre symptoms to drink plenty of water is a good idea because, well, everyone should always try to stay well hydrated. But, seriously, to have Otherness respected is a rare thing. To have it Understood is incredibly special. Was I to ask for my hundred percent, that would be it.

Surprisingly enough, under exactly the same user ID as here. Friend me! Friend me Now!

(Or circle me. Or whatever it is they call it there. It's pretty, though.)

This is the point at which I post an utterly embarrassing first post. I should probably attempt to hit all the cliches.

Tap... tap... tap... is this thing on?

I probably need some speling errrors.

I already used the Hello, World! thing. Kernighan & Ritchie would be proud.

I'd insert a random cat picture here, but I can't actually be bothered to dig out a link.

Um... anything else I can think of?

Oh yes, hi. I am, astonishingly enough, also known as compilerbitch on Livejournal. Feel free to friend me, or whatever that's called in this day and age.

Current Mood: bouncy

This did the rounds of my friends on Twitter and LJ yesterday. It's taken me a bit of time to respond to it, partly because I wanted to think a bit first before writing it, and partly because it brought up a surprising amount of stuff.

Firstly, I was amazed to see this. A mainstream TV ad, albeit not English language, for something entirely unrelated to trans issues or civil rights, using that as its central message. This really is something quite out of the ordinary. Previously, I'd only ever seen trans people depicted in a jokey way, or as victims (though, this ad still has a twinge of that). In the past, I've more than once refused to go to see films with a trans theme, because typically the theme is ultimately demeaning to me. I know a lot of people, for example, who loved Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but, fucking hell, do you people have NO SENSITIVITY??? How am I supposed to feel watching that? And, I have, and kind of wish I hadn't bothered. Not an image I'd like to carry with me. I'm not your convenient joke, your convenient minority who is sufficiently non-trendy and disempowered that it's OK to poke fun at me. The permission for that is mine to give, and you don't have it.

So, back to the ad, and my take on it.

She got an apology.

To my memory, that has never happened to me. Not a sincere apology, anyway. The closest thing might have been my parents, after I refused to talk to them for about three months because they insisted on using incorrect names and gender pronouns against my wishes. I got a kind-of lame halfarsed apology that was framed more along the lines of, you know, you being angry about this is really upsetting to us, it's hard for us, you know, and you shouldn't be so mean about it. Too fucking bad. I'm me. Love me or fuck off. Sorry. Oh wait, no, I'm really not sorry, and I'm not going to comfort you when my reacting badly to you being crap to me upsets you.

I cried yesterday, alone, in my office. I cried because I'd never had that apology. I also cried because I'd never had apologies for many things I deserved apologies for, particularly as a child. The teachers who beat me and psychologically abused me never apologised. The children who bullied and terrorised me never apologised. My parents certainly never apologised for not giving a damn. When I confronted them about it, years later, they couldn't remember me ever having difficulties with bullying, even though I frequently came home bloody and bruised. My father has never apologised for becoming insanely angry at me, and terrifying me, whenever I reacted emotionally. My father has never apologised for molesting the three eight-year-olds that resulted in him spending three years in prison, or the effect that that had on me or the rest of my family. My father has never apologised for stealing over 20000 UK pounds from me, or for forcing his way into control of my first business, taking most of the profit and keeping me trapped living with them because I was earning a pittance.

No one has apologised for all the times I've not been promoted, or not hired in the first place, because I'm trans. No one apologised for throwing me out of Oxford at the end of my first year because I was transitioning. No one apologised for trying to kill me, on that train, in 1997, that left me with concussion and PTSD.

All of these little slices of poison, that stole my life-force, that held me back. That, in an ironic, painful and frankly fucking totally unnecessary kind of way, made me stronger than most people would imagine possible.

To the world at large: don't you ever dare ask me to apologise for being angry about this. That power is mine, and mine alone. I'm taking it back. Reclaiming that lost energy, that lost time, that lost love, that lost hope, that lost life-force. You can't have it. Mine.

I've finally finished processing the landscapes from my trip to the arctic this summer. If you've looked closely at my LJ, you'll have seen most of the images already, but there are another 17 images you've not seen before. The whole thing is sitting in a photo gallery on my web site here.

So, without further ado, here are all the new ones:

Beyond

( 16 more behind the cut, all work safe )

Just a test. Nothing to see here. Move along now...

(Checking out Flock at the moment, just trying out its posting client...)

Gratuitous photo:

tenacious_snail has ninja trouble

[Poll #1273462]

Note that some of the above options are things I can't currently do because of my visa status. My intention for the moment would be to do this entirely on an at-cost basis, with me taking no part of any transaction (i.e you order a book or books direct from the printer/publisher at cost price). Prints I do like to give to people anyway, though the cost involved (to me) does put limits on that.

Also, this isn't in any sense committing anyone to buy anything -- I'm just trying to get a sense of what might and might not work for people, so even if you find yourself clicking the 'wouldn't buy it' option, I'd still be interested in your answers to the other sections.

In terms of likely cost, the bigger the book the more expensive it gets, so think about $15-20 for a paperback, $30 for a smaller hardback, $50-70 for a coffee table book (maybe more if it's really thick). The bound portfolio option will be spendy but gorgeous (think in the $200+ range, cost price is not that cheap). Unbound portfolios would be a bit less. I'm not sure about individual prints at this point, matted, unmatted or framed, because the not-being-seen-to-profit-from-it thing is trickier.

This is the teaser for Laurent Lichtenstein's documentary on HMP. OMG, I'm in the trailer. *hides*

( embedded video behind the cut )

82101

This is the second set of images from the arctic aerial photography series. All of the images in this set were shot from the search and rescue window of an Air National Guard C-130 Hercules, during a series of flights from Resolute Bay to Moffett Field via Yellowknife and Vancouver. They were all shot hand-held with a Nikon D200, then postprocessed in Photoshop.

( 29 more behind the cut )

737 Shines

This is the first of two (or possibly more) portfolios I'm putting together from aerial photography from my trip to the Haughton Mars Project site on Devon Island in the Canadian high arctic.

(All photos: Sarah Thompson/Haughton Mars Project)

During my trip, I found myself having considerable opportunity for aerial photography. In all, I photographed from a 737, a Beechcraft 100, a Twin Otter (two flights), a helicopter, and a C-130 Hercules (three flights). This portfolio is comprised of images from the 737, one of the Twin Otter flights and the helicopter. Locations are mostly Devon Island, unless specified.

Artistically speaking, what I am going for is applying a fairly forceful B&W presentation to aerial images, giving a traditional landscape photography feel to images that are more typically seen in mapping systems like Google Earth. All of these photos were shot with a Nikon D200, hand-held. The helicopter shots were shot without glass, with the door removed, so I was hanging out of the door from the copilot's seat, though I was wearing a 4-point harness. The other images were shot through windows, so I am grateful for finding glass with reasonably good optical quality.

( 31 more behind the cut... )

Ad Astra

( Lots more images behind the cut )

It's all over now, bar the unloading at the processing of the thousands of images.

:-)

I got to Res yesterday afternoon, so I'm now ~~chilling out~~ warming up at South Camp. I'll be here until the C-130 pickup, most likely on Thursday, so I'd best get on with making the most of it. :-)

More when I have news...

This is probably my last chance to get a message out before comms goes down. We're having pretty strong wind (not looked at the weather station, but probably 40kts at least), subzero temperatures and freezing fog. It's taken out the C-band dish, but the Ka-band is still up. As a consequence, our IP phones are now down.

Given the weather, the plan seems to be to pull people out as and when we can get planes in. Currently that's not happening. There is some possibility that the C-130 might be delayed by anything up to several days, or that we might be stuck on the island for a while (maybe several days). We have a lot of food, the infrastructure is holding up pretty well, so no one needs to panic, though be advised that you probably won't hear from me again until I manage to make it to Resolute, or possibly not even then since their comms is actually flakier than ours.

I'll post here again when I next have comms. See you all soon (I hope!).

One small step for a man and his dog
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Sea Ice 1
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Salute
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Yesterday, I took part in a moderately nontrivial traverse from base camp to the coast and back again. It was a 14-hour round-trip, truly punishing, across mile after mile of boulder fields by ATV. We'd cross a boulder field, then a river, then some mud, then another boulder field, then another boulder field with bigger boulders, then a boulder field with steep slopes... yeah, hard work. When I got back my hands were sufficiently sore from holding the handlebars that I had to get

dangerpudding to put a plate of food in the microwave oven for me because I couldn't pick it up. But... the view at the other end was astonishing. As usual, I'm feeling the lack of Photoshop here, so these three are just really intended to be a taster, but I shot something like 800 frames, so hopefully There Will Be More later.

Today and tomorrow I'm not due to leave camp. Wednesday/Thursday there is a planned two-day megatraverse, but since I'm supposed to be flying out to Resolute on Thursday I don't know yet what I'll be doing in relation to the traverse.

Weather is getting noticeably worse, now. Night is almost dark, and it's much colder. This field season is the longest ever at HMP, and there is now a nonzero chance of being snowed in, which would be a problem since the Twin Otters won't be able to land. Maybe NASA will spring for heli pickup...

Planet of the Apes Valley
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Breccia Hills
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Boulders
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Note: These photos aren't quite processed the way I'd prefer -- I'm still out in the field, stuck with using UFRaw and Gimp and badly missing my beloved Photoshop. But, treat them as an artist's impression of an artist's impression, if you would...

I'm going to be on the moon for the next couple of weeks. We're simulating surface traverses with a pair of pressurised rovers (represented by a Humvee and a Mule in our case), and we're going to be going out on long distance, two-day missions involving Apollo-style geological sample collection. There are lots of check lists, radio protocols, there's a capcom. Getting out and collecting samples is an EVA. On the Humvee, they are using space suits. Very moon landingish.

In practical terms, from my point of view, it involves following a 4wd truck around on an ATV, carrying extra supplies and just basically being an extra person for getting unstuck from mud type purposes. I was hoping to be able to take the 4x5, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen, at least on the next traverse. From the forecast, the weather is going to SUCK, for values of suck involving 50 knot winds and 8C with rain, and I'm going to be out in it all day for two 18 hour days in a row. I'm not specially looking forward to that, to be honest.

Anyway, there was a dry-run today:

On the Moon
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Going to the Moon mostly involves paperwork
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

brian1789 and Charles Frankel on EVA
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Hills 1
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Mars Hab
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

HMP from above
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Tent City
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

(Guess who got to ride in a heli with the door taken off today!)

Another day at the office...

The DAME autonomous drill

Lemming and Lasers

Ping Pong, the Dog from Mars

Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson

It went dark.

It got really cold(er).

It started raining.

Then it got light again.

Standing outside, freezing, with a bunch of space scientists, journalists, a film crew and sundry geeks, in the arctic, watching the sky go dark then light again. Shame about the cloud, but it's still pretty cool...

I've not updated for a little while, mostly because nothing much has happened other than drilling. Lots of drilling. There were some software problems initially that have now been mostly resolved, in part thanks to probably the weirdest telecon ever yesterday, which I held from the drill site in the crater via an IP phone, two microwave repeaters, a satellite uplink and teh internetz.

Just a day and a half of drilling left now. Today and half of tomorrow, followed by packing up the drill and other equipment, taking down the huge orange dome tent that's been our home away from home away from home for the last few days, and waiting for the Humvee to come and pick us up.

I'm getting pretty used to ATVs being daily routine transport now. It takes about 20 minutes in each direction to the drill site, 40 minutes if we have to go via the repeater sites. They are amazing little vehicles -- it's hard to imagine anything else being able to get over some of the more extreme terrain. Part of learning to ride them is just basically getting the idea that, yes, they *will* go over that huge scary-looking pile of rocks, and then just getting on with it.

Then, it's the eclipse. Latest weather forecasts give us a roughly 50:50 chance of seeing it, so I'm crossing everything. Then, two weeks of entirely other stuff starts. Pretty much everyone here will be switching over to a big experiment involving simulating a lunar exploration mission with two rovers. My 'thing' will be following one of the two rovers on an ATV, shooting photos and video, and probably doing a few other mission support tasks as becomes necessary. This is going to be pretty cool, I think, because it'll involve going on very long traverses right across the crater, so I have to admit that I'm looking forward to the opportunities for photography that will inevitably come up. And there will be people in space suits. Did I mention the space suits?

Dry Stream
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

From base camp
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Base camp
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

The Fortress
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Solar Panels
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

ᐃᓄᒃᓱᒃ
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Hello, world!

I've been in camp this morning hacking the drill code while the rest of the team moved equipment to the drill site with the Humvee and several ATVs. With luck, we should be drilling this afternoon. My stuff will probably go live tomorrow once the drill has been checked out and is known to be working properly. w00t!

FYI, the HMP network will be down until 12.30pm local time. I don't think this will affect the IP phones, but it might. The Ka-band dish is down, and one of the projects needs the whole C-band dish this morning, so I'll probably be silent for a while.

Tent stuff was better last night. My cot is still broken, though a new one should show up on the next Twin Otter for me.

Well, last night wasn't fun. I don't know if my tent wasn't up to the job, or my sleeping bag, or both, but I froze. I was wearing several layers, two hats (yes, layers on my head), a scarf, gloves and really thick socks inside my sleeping bag (which is rated to -20C), and I found myself getting colder and colder. I dozed off a couple of times, but when I woke up shivering I realised that, whilst I wasn't actually hypothermic at the time, I would be if I got any colder, so I got up (this was about 2.30am/3am, I don't remember) and went to the mess tent in camp which has a diesel-fired stove. I then spent the next couple of hours huddled next to it, then I eventually fell asleep for a while.

What I *think* happened was, the design of my tent is basically pretty bad -- it seems to assume relatively little wind, with precipitation falling more or less vertically. However, last night it was basically raining horizontally, and since the outer fly doesn't seal against the ground, wind (with rain in it) just blows under it. The inner tent is fully enclosed, but the fabric is not waterproof beyond about 4 inches above the ground, probably to ensure enough ventilation in warmer climates. I am going to attempt to rig something more effective later -- I can probably get away with taking a few garbage bags and duck-taping them around the edge of the fly sheet, then weighting them down with rocks to make a seal around the base of the tent all the way around. It won't be pretty, but last night was horrible, so...

Oh, and the army cot I got from Polar Shelf broke too, so I wasn't a happy bunny. I've asked for another one to be sent out on the next Twin Otter, hopefully today.

Just an FYI, we're in the middle of a storm here (for the British definition of storm). 80-100kph winds, rain. It's *cold*. Our comms are being flaky -- the Ka band is having weather problems. Tents all holding fine so far.

My first traverse went well today. 3km on ATVs to some hydrothermal vents on the crater rim, crossing a variety of surfaces from playa-like loose dust, gravel, mud, water to rubble and boulder fields. They are amazing vehicles, though I'm told the route we took was a bit of a baptism of fire for someone first time out. Nevertheless, we have found a location for the drill, so we'll be setting it up as soon as the storm clears, probably Thursday according to weather forecasts.

Today was my first view into the actual crater. No pictures, sorry, I didn't take cameras because I wasn't sure what the environment was going to be like, and I am going to be spending a week or so out there anyway so there isn't a particular rush. I'll probably take the 4x5 out there because we'll be shipping the gear out in the Humvee so there won't be a risk of damaging it with the amount of thrashing about that ATVs tend to exert on their payloads, and it's a really good vantage point for panos anyway. I'd also like to be able to image our own project with the big camera, so it kind-of makes sense. I can even leave it plugged in to the mains (we will have a generator out there) and run a long USB cable to it from the dome tent if I have to, should it be necessary.

Impressions: the crater. Enormous, beautiful, stark, slightly frightening in some ways. I've been to Meteor Crater, AZ, and frankly this place makes it look like a pinprick. The far rim was just visible in the distance -- I've noticed previously that no photos I've ever seen actually look 'cratery', and I can see why now. It's so huge that you probably have to be there to 'get' the scale of the place. Obviously, I see this as a challenge, so hopefully I will be able to pull off at least one genuinely cratery image. :-)

Dinner tonight was spag bol. Not bad. Followed by

brian1789's birthday cake, complete with chocolate mushrooms. (Happy birthday, by the way!)

We're here.

Currently still getting set up. My tent is up. We still have a few orientation things to do today (safety talk, ATV training, etc.), but we're here. It's moderatly chilly.

And it totally looks like Mars.

:-)

[s]

We just heard that we're going out to Devon Island at 9.30AM local time (US Central time, GMT - 6 hours I think). I'm packing my gear now (or will be once I've posted this), so I'll be off-grid until I'm at HMP.

Apparently the drill is that you go and put your tent up as the first thing you do when you arrive, so with that and lunch it may be a while before I get to post again, but hopefully there will be something later today.

The Nikon's batteries are charged and its CF card is formatted, so expect good stuff soon!

Where do we go from here?
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

I'm posting this from Resolute. It's... cold. Bright. Sunny. Midnight. Strange, familiar, unfamiliar, weird. It's a long way from everywhere.

I'm not that good at expressing my feelings in prose, but the following photo captures my impression of the bleakness of this part of the arctic:

Resolute bleakness
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Scale is weird. It's very hard to tell how far away something is. Is it a polar bear? Is it a signpost? Is it a paper cup much closer? That sounds silly out of context, but it's one of the most striking impressions I've had since arriving. The other one is a nagging feeling that something has gone wrong with time. During the arctic day, or at least what would be day in the same time zone much further south, there isn't a proper sense of time passing. I now realise that I somehow automatically track the passing of time relative to, if not the position of the sun, but perhaps its warmth, brightness, angle or some combination of these things. Here, the sun doesn't do what you expect it to, and it seemed to cause a strange disconnect inside myself, a feeling of knowing, intellectually, that all is well, but feeling deeper down that there is a degree of wrongness here.

Nevertheless, it's completely stunning. Really, truly, stunning. The quality of light is extraordinary -- there is a crisp clarity about it that begs for a really sharp lens and a lot of resolution. Large format weather.

( More images behind the cut )

We made it safely to Resolute about three hours ago, after three flights, two on a 737 cargo plane and one on a little Beechcraft 100 twin-engine turboprop.

I shot a load of photos today with the Nikon -- I'll process them and upload a few to flickr later tonight, and I'll do a photo post here, so watch this space.

The arctic is OMGWTFCopter stunning. You'll see what I mean later. The quality of light here is amazing -- clear and sharp, and asking to have large format cameras pointed at it. Which will follow in due course, assuming that mine has survived being out in the rain (in a Pelican case) for 3 weeks, but...

Weather here is 'warm' (i.e. about 1C). I like it, anyway -- it actually reminds me a lot of a clear, still day in winter in Northumberland. Except it's the middle of summer, there is almost no vegetation anywhere (it totally really does look like Mars), and the sun doesn't set.

Going off-grid. Hopefully I'll be able to post again tonight from Resolute.

*zoom*

How to be sensible..., originally uploaded by compilerbitch.

Just in case any of you start thinking of me as a Serious Rocket Scientist...

I'm in Edmonton, CA. First leg of the trip completed. Going through customs is rather more fun when you have big scary bits of paper listing the governments who won't be happy if you're not let through without problems...

Minor international incident. A piece of equipment that we were carrying up with us got stuck on a conveyor in such a place that they had to get *both* US and Canadian customs to re-clear it.

Dinner with locals tonight, then up stupidearly in the morning. Tomorrow night I'll be in the arctic.

I'm going to sleep now. kthxbye.

My computer geek score is greater than 100% of all people in the world! How do you compare? Click here to find out!

0% scored higher (more computer geeky),
0% scored the same, and
100% scored lower (less geeky).

What does this mean? Your computer geekiness is:

Step aside Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Steve Jobs... You are by far the SUPREME COMPUTER GOD!!!

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags