I feel the need - the need for speed! Today I got to take my first skidoo ride and it was heaps of fun. Brenda brought a skidoo out to pick up the Gmount tent and take it out to the cargo berms on the other side of the station. Luckily enough I arrived at the AASTO just in time to be invited for a ride. Yes, please! Brenda drove the skidoo, Fred sat behind her and I stood on the sled behind them, holding on to a rail (a picture of my perch should be attached). At first it was quite jerky and bumpy as Brenda tried to get the skidoo back on the road but after that it was smooth skidooing. It was probably only about 60kph (a picture shows its hinted-at speeds) but it felt really fast! And very, very cold :). We zoomed our way past the station and into the previously-unexplored-by-me territory past the Jamesways.

When we reached several very long lanes separated but metre-high banks of snow I realised what the "berms" were. Basically they use bulldozers to create a long, raised area of snow, about 200m long and a few metres wide (picture). On this snow they pile all the cargo that the station has in storage. Keeping it above the ground is to stop the snow drifts from burying it, I was reliably informed by the cargo manager on station. The box the tent was supposed to go into was on top of two other boxes, so about 4 metres up in total. We ended up using a tag-team effort to get everything put away - Fred, on the ground, passed to me, on the snow, who passed to Brenda, up at the box. Then Brenda very kindly drove us back out to the AASTO! Two rides in one day, hurrah for Zoidberg!

Prior to all this excitement I was trying to fix the planet computer. If you recall, I described planet as our calm and controlled mediator whilst phobos and deimos were having it out. Obviously all the stress has finally gotten to it and now it no longer boots and despite invoking the impressive sounding "linux rescue" it still appears to have prescribed itself a bit of a time out. All my fiddling seemed to do was cause more bits of it to shutdown so eventually I gave up and that was when I found myself at the AASTO just in time for a skidoo ride!

After this, Colin and I had another go at levelling the Gmount. See we had a system now, and we decided to get that more precise (though uncalibrated) level back from the dark sector (a long trek for yours truly). We strapped Colin's tripod to the side of the mount and attached the digital camera and set it to automatically take images after Colin had gotten off the tower. Theoretically it was a big improvement on the previous days efforts of Colin standing there (and unlevelling the tower with his weight) and taking the photos by hand (so they were all taken at different angles and distances). However we had forgotten the other annoying thing about the first level, which was its response to cold temperature. Despite this, it looks like we have it as good as it can be (to within about 10 arcseconds), and after Fred and Colin balance the telescope tomorrow we will have another quick whip-around with the second level just to make sure they haven't wrecked it!






- Jessie