Thursday, February 27, 2014

The laser! What can I say? We tried it, and it worked!


Sham and I headed over to the 0PAL lab just after supper to get (re)acquainted with the lab, and to see whether we could get anything done in preparation for the next full day's work. This time, luckily, there was a) distilled water whose containers had not frozen themselves to the floor, b) a good sky for lidaring, c) no snow on our hatch (Thanks, Pierre and Mike!). The lab was in great shape, so after checking things out, we jumped right in.

We got the green laser firing out of the hatch, launched the data acquisition program, and (miracle of miracles) went to sleep while the lidar took care of running itself. We managed to get the emails sent by the lidar's alarm program (in case we need to shut down for snow or wind) to make audible alarms when they arrived in our inboxes. Sounds low-tech and like it should not be hard (especially if you're used to email on a phone... which I am not!), but is surprisingly hard to do on some Certain Brands of Laptop. Even when they have built-in features for the purpose. In any event, without the audible feature, the lidar operator has to wake up every so often and check on things. With the audio... well, it's easier. A Fancy Tablet worked great for me, and Sham's phone seems to be working for her.

In the morning, we woke up to a 9-hour data set in our visible channels.

This counts as a successful bonus lab day!

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