The Usual Updates

The melons are doing great, but the rate of growth has slowed down. I’m taking that to mean that they are almost ripe or that they were very effected by the drop in CO2 in the growth chamber. We have run out of CO2 gas cylinders in the elevated station, there are more on the berms but we won’t realistically be able to find them until it is light out so the plants must survive on the normal levels on CO2 in the station that we polies provide.

 In other news we came in second place in the darts tournament, lost to the underdogs at DDU who joined the tournament two weeks after the official start.  They are a happy bunch of French winter overs on the coast and have had daylight back again for a while now.

We entered nautical twilight this past Saturday the sun is now about 12 degrees below the horizon. Nautical twilight is named because it starts just after it is dark enough to see the main 63 stars that sailors used to navigate by back in the day. The sky was cloudy but had an undeniably bluer hue almost opposite the moon yesterday. With the moon, twilight and the clouds there were hardly any visible stars any more (which is actually pretty sad). Because the full moon and twilights are getting so bright the sensitive aurora cameras on the roof of the station will be shut off on Wednesday (tomorrow). Once these cameras are shut off we will be able to take the window covers off because there is no more risk of camera damaging light pollution. This is a huge ‘end of winter’ mile stone and it will be great to be able to see out of the galley windows again (although it is going to be a lot colder in the galley with the windows exposed).  Temperatures are still cold, -80 F to -90 F this past week, plus 8 to 15 knots of wind (it’s been a pretty cold week).