Days are getting ever shorter with daylight now lasting for ~7.5 hours but the polar night is still more than a month away. In the last three weeks we have had one official blizzard and a couple of might-have-beens with maximum wind speeds around 75 knots. We also got some snow last night and this morning Antarctica is looking very very lovely with a fresh ~15cm cover of pure white fluffy stuff. I have to go and do some snow angels this afternoon, there's no way around it. Life is good!

Life at the station is going its merry way. I did my first slot of 2-day slushy service in the kitchen and almost got inspired to do some cooking too (but that remains a definite 'almost' for now). Amongst other things we've been doing some further SAR training in the greenstore. Various rope and pulley systems were set up and we spent the morning prussiking, tying knots and rescuing each other from crevasses. Everyone is waiting for the sea ice to thicken up a bit further but we'll have to wait for the ice cover to extend a bit longer as the blizzard blew quite a lot of it away last week. Everyone is using their allocated head torches regularly now and it has become almost a reflex to check that when you leave a building you have gloves, hat, snow goggles, torch and possibly a radio in your pocket. Makes me think of the "wallet, keys and mobile" reflex - it is now more than six months since I locked my door, used money or spoke on the mobile.

The lidar has not been running too many days this month since we have only had a few clear nights (the photo above shows the actual lidar observatory with sun just rising, taken this morning). It also seems that any especially promising coronal hole or solar flare occurrence is guaranteed to take place when we have overcast weather down here - awesome aurora or clear skies, pick one! Our fluxgate magnetometer kindly tells us what we missed out on.

Davis being one of the global validation sites we have been waiting for the CALIPSO/CloudSat launch to go ahead after a series of frustrating delays. The launch was finally supposed to take place last Friday but it was canned at t-48s due to technical problems not related to the actual spacecraft. CALIPSO and CloudSat will join the NASA EOS A-train constellation which will consist of Aqua, CloudSat, CALIPSO, Parasol and Aura flying in formation to provide unprecedented near-simultaneous coverage of the state of the atmosphere. Check out the CALIPSO website at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/calipso/main/index.html

In between wading through a thick pile of PSC literature and testing the data analysis system I have also made some progress with the VLF experiment. Apart from making a total fool of myself in the lab with less-than-elegant soldering I am almost there and the antenna is now sitting nicely in a solid mount. I have enough material to make another coil to mount it 90 degrees to the current one for directional resolution but I'd be happy with even the first antenna producing something (that soldering was really quite nasty!).